Seventeen Days
by OnceUponASomeday
Summary: Hospital walls and all that's in-between.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer: They're not mine - if they were, I would have kicked Deacon out of that car and made him get the bus. **

His chair, the nurses call it.

They don't move it from the corner where he put it the night he was well enough - not really enough - to get up from his hospital bed and find her room. The doctors had tried to stop him, of course, something about broken ribs not healing so well when you're dragging the drip in your arm up and down sterile corridors, but he doesn't give a shit about his ribs even if he does feel them crack every time he breathes in. Rayna would have told him off if she'd been awake, told him he was being a stubborn idiot and he should listen to the people in the white coats. But she isn't awake, she hasn't been awake for two and a half weeks - seventeen days, he counts the hours of each one - and he would give anything to have her scold him, tell him he needs to go back to bed and stop giving the nurses more work to do. He stays with her at night times, when there is no one else in her room but doctors who write things on the chart at the end of her bed and the nurses who look pityingly at him and leave without a word. He stays to keep her company when it's dark outside and she's alone, and he stays because he cannot do anything but. His Chair, the man with sunken eyes in an ashen face who sits and looks at her like he is nothing more than the sum of his parts, and every one of those parts hurts like hell because she lies there and doesn't move. They all know who he is, they know who she is to him, and they don't ask questions. There's a cushion on His Chair when he goes to sit in it on the fifth night she doesn't wake up.

#

He doesn't hold her hand. He can't; a spider's thread is all that's holding him together and it would snap the moment he touched her and felt her cold skin. In life her hands are always busy - gripping a microphone, slicing ham and cheese sandwiches for her children, tracing the line of stubble on his chin. Her hands are gentle, delicate, warm, they can soothe a cut knee and rub an upset stomach better - his, often, in days gone by - but they can just as well change a tyre and wipe the oil on his jeans suggestively. Her hands have always been on his list of favourite things about her, but in this bed in this hospital that smells of cleaning fluid and fear they are empty and still. They lay at her side with nothing to do, nothing to keep them busy. So he doesn't hold her hand.

#

She's hooked up to machines, lots of machines, and the wires remind him of veins, reds and blues and strange clear tubes that pump things into her. He doesn't know what any of the machines do, only that they keep her alive, and for that he is grateful. Some of them beep, sometimes too quickly and he feels red hot fear shoot through him, but they slow and he calms. The hole in his side that is held together with stitches burns when that happens, and he's glad it does; he's sorry, so sorry. There are so many machines.

#

The nurses like him. They shouldn't let him sleep in her room, not really, he's not her next of kin - not on paper - and he's a patient too, so if they were playing by the rules they should send him packing to his uncomfortable bed under the clock on the wall that ticks too loudly. But rules don't count when your love is breathing through a tube and the bruises on her face are so bad they're almost black and when you are a broken man who might just stop breathing yourself if they make you move more than a few metres from her. And besides, the nurses like him. He heard them say so when he was pretending to be asleep one night, heard them call it romantic, his vigil. _For a man to love you like that_ they said, _doesn't it get you right there?_ The nurses have a soft spot for the man that nearly killed his love.

#

These walls have become familiar. There is a card on the side from her daughters, Daphne's carefully measured letters spelling out her name finished with a wonky love heart, Maddie's shaky scrawl professing her hope that their mother will be home with them soon. Flowers sit on every surface, sent by people she knows and people she doesn't, family, friends, fans. He wonders how many will die before she wakes. In the corner there is a bag of her things. He looked through it when he could no longer help himself, the urge to hold something that was her overwhelmingly strong. There had been clothes, a hopeful gesture that she would need them, a photograph of her with the girls, her favourite necklace. And there had been a paperback book with a piece of paper sticking out where she'd been up to. When he'd pulled it out to look at it, he'd seen that she'd been marking her page with a ticket stub from one of their shows, a small concert hall they'd played twenty years ago. His hands had shook as he'd zipped the bag back up.

#

He spends his nights breathing in time with her. Her chest rises and falls and he watches it; it is the only constant he has to grasp on to. He started doing it the first night he stayed in her room, realised by accident that he was mimicking her, her intakes of air an assurance of life, even if they are prompted mechanically. In and out, in and out, steady. It is of little comfort, but comfort all the same. He breathes with her to encourage her to join him, wills her to do it too.

#

The hospital gowns are itchy. He hates them. He'd tried to swap his for a flannel he'd gotten Scarlett to smuggle in but a nurse, the nice one with the really round hips, took it from him and locked it in a cupboard, and he hasn't been able to find the key. Not even in all the hours he's had with nothing to do during the days when Rayna has visitors who fill her room but never sit in His Chair and he can't bring himself to go near them because if he did he'd have to look them in the eye, the people she loves who nearly lost her. He has a daughter, he knows now, she comes to see her mother, brushes her hair and sings her lullabies. He listens outside the door, would try his best to give her some semblance of comfort if he didn't think she would puncture his other lung, if he didn't think she would punish him with all she has for what he has done. He knows that she knows, they all do, he's seen the newspapers on the reception as he passes, the ones the woman sat behind the desk tries to hide. And then comes the day he hears Maddie sing one of their songs to her, her sweet voice quiet and sad, the words almost lost, but he would know the melody anywhere. It is brandished in his memory, and when he hears it the grief wraps around him so tightly everything spins and a nurse finds him there, slumped against the wall. He isn't allowed to stay with Rayna that night.

#

It's been a week when he wakes to find a blanket tucked up to his chin. It's one of those cheap things, threadbare and washed in harsh detergent, used by countless people who have sat and fought off the chill of the ward while they wait and say prayers and try not to lose themselves in the desolation of it all.

'Mornin' Bertha,' he says, and his voice is scratchy from lack of use. He hasn't done much talking while he's been in here. He's done a lot of thinking, but not much talking. He wouldn't know what to say.

'It's the middle of the night sugar,' Bertha gently tells him, her standard issue shoes squeaking quietly on the floor tiles, 'and you're doing yourself no favours being wide awake.' She hands him a polystyrene cup full of the nasty vending machine coffee that Rayna secretly likes, and offers him a smile. It's small, but it's a smile, and there haven't been many of those coming his way lately. The coffee tastes better than anything he's put in his mouth since the whiskey that landed them there.

#

From the window in his room he can see the car park, comings and goings regular in the day, sirens and flurries of doctors racing to bring in a new casualty. He thinks about what it was like the night they brought him and Rayna in. Whether anyone was in this room then, stood by the window, watching. Wondering if they'd make it.

#

She doesn't wear one of the gowns. She did, but one night he opens the door and is stopped in his tracks by the image of her in the bed. The tubes have been removed from her throat, she breathes on her own, and she is in a nightgown he knows, one he's seen her in when they've been on tour and he's found her on the roof of their hotel staring out into nothing when her attempts at sleep have failed. It is dark blue and made of silk, and he allows himself the smallest touch, a little patch that lays across her shoulder. Her hair has been washed and brushed and it is fanned out on a pillow borrowed from her own bed. She looks like Rayna. He is still crying when Bertha comes in and makes him sit in His Chair and drink a glass of tap water.

#

He finds a card on his nightstand when they have been in the hospital for two weeks. It is white with a simple picture of a daisy, and it contains only one line. _Get well soon Deacon_, it reads,_ love Maddie_. He puts it next to the one from his sister and looks at it so many times the words no longer make sense.

#

Coleman comes to see him every day. He comes to make sure he's not tipping the contents of a hipflask into the bitter orange juice they give him for breakfast, and he comes to make sure he's not hovering on a window ledge with his arse hanging out of his hospital gown. He brings him magazines to give him something to look at other than the hastily painted ceiling and Rayna's frozen face, and for a while he took to reading them, but he stopped the day he opened one at a paparazzi picture of the upturned wreck he used to drive to pick up groceries. Coleman also comes to tell him everything will be ok, she'll be ok, they'll be ok. He doesn't know if he believes him, but a part of him that is a little boy who is oh so lost clings on for dear life to hope. It is all he has.

#

On the seventeenth day he hears the machines beep from down the hall and he knows it's her room the panicked footsteps run towards.


	2. Chapter 2

**Well your very sweet reviews got me a little overly excited and I seem to have sat down and written another chapter, so you've only got yourselves to blame ;) Thank you so much for the encouragement, I really hope you enjoy...**

She sips water through a straw. The doctors won't let her have anything else, they tell her she isn't ready, isn't strong enough to walk, isn't healed enough to sit up, isn't going to get out of here anytime soon. They feed her through a drip that would leave a bruise on her arm if only she wasn't already so covered in bruises she looks like a map of China. She can't see the colour of her own skin anymore.

#

There is a morning she wakes with the surety that she can smell him. He has been here. The very feel of him lingers in the anonymous air of the room, and there is an imprint in the cushion that sits in the chair furthest away from her. She tells herself she's imagining it - he was discharged a week ago - but she knows. He was here.

#

Her fingernails have been painted. When she can lift her hands high enough to look at them she inspects the shiny pink polish. She never wears pink, and it gives away the culprits. Daphne picked out the colour and Maddie did the painting, they tell her, and Daphne falls quiet when she asks in mock horror how chipped the polish was that she'd had on before. The blood beneath her nails had shocked them when they'd taken the old stuff off, and they'd scrubbed it away with a brush and warm water, her two daughters who were too young to lose their mother. She had been, too.

#

The last night they spent together was a happy one. Stupidly happy, actually. It had been three nights before the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan and the car hit the embankment and their blood mingled and stained the grass until it rained the next day. They'd come home - Deacon's home that felt more like her home than the place that had her name next to Teddy's on the deeds - from the Grand Ole Opry where Scarlett had given Rayna butterflies as she'd watched from the side of the stage. They'd settled on his couch with mismatched mugs of cocoa, hers with the little sprinkle of cinnamon he'd always added for her, and she'd rested her legs across his lap and watched him with her head on the worn leather. He'd looked at her like he had craved her for all of time, and in place of the barely contained pain he had worn for years was a slightly dazed look, a man so in love he couldn't quite believe she was there smiling at him and wearing his jumper to keep out the chill. He'd burnt his lip on his cocoa and she'd laughed softly as she'd kissed him, and when they'd fallen into his bed later he'd still tasted of chocolate, and she hadn't laughed when she'd kissed him then. It hurts when she cries, so she doesn't do it.

#

Maddie knows. It hits her one morning when the nurses have done their rounds and they've closed the door behind them and left her a fresh water glass. Maddie knows Deacon is her father. She wonders if there might be an odd sense of relief in the place she is so used to feeling guilt, but there is none to be found. The guilt is so strong it almost chokes her, and for the first time she enjoys the pain shooting through her abdomen where half the windscreen definitely shouldn't have been. The pain is punishment for thirteen years of lies. She tries to use it to distract herself from how much everything else hurts. Her shattered ribcage and the grotesque protrusion of her arm will heal far sooner than everything else. She is glad it's her lying in the hard bed and not him. She hopes he is home drinking tea in his kitchen.

#

Bucky brings her DVDs. Terrible ones, Caddyshack levels of terrible, and she loves him for it. He comes to see her with Tandy and Rayna sees how close they have grown, is glad that something good has sprung from something so otherwise shitty. He squeezes her sister's shoulder as he tells them he is going to make a phone call, and Rayna watches her face as she nods up at him with a beam she tries to keep in check. 'What?' is all Tandy says, but Rayna grills her for details. It cheers her up even more than Chevy Chase.

#

Liam sends flowers. Of course he does, a cancelled weekend of sex and suncream is no match for learning you have a child who cried through the night as a baby for a father she didn't know was hers. The note with the flowers - lilies, she loves lilies - tells her he is in Germany, that he came to see her when she was still out cold. He jokes about them needing to finish their record, could she hurry up and get back on her feet please, what a dramatic way to score some time off work, and she sleeps with the little card under her pillow, wondering how different it would have been if she hadn't felt the desperate urge to tell Deacon she loved him. It had been as much for his benefit as for hers, her need to share what she knew was such longed-for information what had fuelled her to drive over there that night and change her mind six times about knocking on his door before she'd just thought _screw it_ and done it anyway. The way he couldn't look at her in that hallway backstage had been like ice in her belly, how _tired_ he was of it, the struggle she'd known just as long as he had. But she was a mother, was for a long time a wife, was a star, had pockets she could hide in, Other Things. Deacon had no other things. He had only his love for her and a pen he used to write about his love for her and a guitar he played the songs on that he wrote about his love for her, and his torment had nowhere else to go. She saw it in his face when he stared at anything but her, and she knew it was time, that she needed to save him from not knowing she felt it just like he did. So she told him she loved him. The lilies wither in three days.

#

Daphne reads her stories. It's creative writing semester at school, and she wants to share her efforts with her mother, her little voice proud as she reads from her exercise book with the music note doodles on the front in HB pencil. When she thinks Rayna is asleep, her eyes coaxed shut by tales of Alfie the class hamster, she lays her head down on the bed and cries softly. But Rayna isn't asleep, and her daughter's tears remind her just what a close call she's had. She strokes her hair and murmurs nonsensical words until Daphne is the one who falls asleep.

#

He wants them to be a family again, Teddy tells her. He misses her, he wants her to come home, to a real home, their family home. He wants to stop the divorce proceedings. She doesn't know what she wants. He was a pillar for her back when her life was in pitiable tatters, and he has been a pillar for her this time too. He brings the girls to see her every day. He sneaks in the little chocolate truffles that she loves and isn't supposed to eat but Teddy is surprising in the rules he breaks for her. He changes her pyjamas when she is well enough to wear her own, rubs her arm while he sits and tells her unimportant bits of information about the outside world just so she doesn't forget it exists. She feels vulnerable, like all of her armour has been stripped away, and she supposes it has, really. She lies there at the mercy of other people, unable to be who she used to spend her days being, and there is no Deacon to anchor her, no Deacon to act as a mirror for her to look into and see herself as she is - as she has always been with her armour stripped away. It is a comfort, the thought of being a family, of being safe and cocooned from the nightmare she survived once and just about made it through this time. She doesn't know if she will survive it again. She doesn't know what she wants.

#

He holds her hand. It is her father that sits in the visitor's chair this time, not her. She lays in the bed with her eyes closed, too exhausted to say anything, and he holds her hand. It has been years since he's held her hand. She would almost be able to remember the exact occasion if she thought about it hard enough, probably when she was a child, still in pigtails and knee socks, racing through a playground and emerging from a sandpit with a split lip. Her father's hands are dry and unused to giving love, but they try, and she squeezes them back.

#

Like trying to catch a butterfly, Watty had said. He was talking about her mother but as she watches the spider that spins itself in circles at the corner of the open window she can hear Deacon repeat the same words to Maddie one day when she is trying to understand how the people that conceived her fucked everything up so badly. For only two people they have made a hell of a mess. She watches the spider reverse pointlessly and bump into the glass and is angry at it for not seeing how stupid it is being.

#

It isn't furniture this time, it's bones. She's broken fifty-two of them, Dr Hill says. He has a wife and three children and a condo in Florida that he plans to retire to next year when his pension plan starts paying out. His wife has all of her albums, he tells her with a conspiratorial wink, her favourites are the ones she sang with that old flame, the chap who was down the hall. Lucky escape they had there didn't they? Oh and Dr Hill has a set of golf clubs that are finally going to come out of his cupboard - there are golf courses everywhere in Florida. What Rayna has is fifty-two broken bones and a pain in her chest that she doesn't think has anything to do with the accident and that she knows has everything to do with it. He'd broken the furniture the night he found out she'd married Teddy. He was supposed to be in rehab three hundred miles away - who'd have thought you could persuade three guards and a doorman to let you out of a no-outside-contact residential facility? But then he always was persuasive when he was hell-bent on one of his benders. He didn't know she was pregnant. She wonders if he'd still have thrown that lamp so close to her head if he had known.

#

She only asks about Deacon twice. Once when she first wakes up, disorientated and confused and scared that she doesn't know where the hell she is and she can't feel her toes and her lungs are obviously on fucking fire because nothing else could possibly make them blaze so much. Maddie is there with Teddy, no Daphne, she's too young to see her mother screw her eyes closed and try not to scream with the pain. It probably shouldn't hurt so much, given that she's drugged up to her eyeballs and she doesn't really know what her own name is unless she really really thinks about it, but it does and when her nerves have become aware of their trauma, her mind joins the party and that's a hundred times worse. There aren't enough drugs in the whole damn hospital for that. When she asks about him that time it is through gritted teeth that try not to clamp shut so she can breathe and her grip on Maddie's hand probably hurts her. She needs to know, and she needs someone to tell her quickly, and Maddie does, she tells her he is alive and for that moment it is enough. The second time is more considered, Tandy is by her bedside and they are reading crossword puzzles while it rains outside. 'Two across, six letters, Johnny Cash record,' she says, and Rayna answers: 'Tell me how he is.' The puzzle books slips off the edge of the bedcovers as Tandy replies, keeping it brief. He's at home, Coleman's been forcing him to rest. Rayna doesn't know whether to be relieved or bereft that he is more than a few walls away from her.

#

Bertha brings her her first cup of coffee. It's the stuff from the vending machine, the stuff she used to hate but grew so used to when she'd spent half her life here with Deacon in a bed having his stomach pumped and broken glass picked out of his forehead. It was always too hot, but she had never been able to let it cool, needing the caffeine to hit her veins so she could stay awake and make sure he didn't rip the needles out of his hands and try to leave. Funny how it became a constant, something she knew would never change even if the doctors did and the lines on his face grew deeper and the chairs were replaced with plastic ones she could never sleep in. She wishes Bertha had been here then. The coffee leaves a bitter tang in her mouth that tastes better than anything has since the searing kiss Deacon gave her before it all went wrong.

#

Juliette is her most surprising visitor. When she takes her hand Rayna almost laughs from pure shock, but she doesn't, she holds right on back and listens as she talks about how sorry she is for what's happened. From anyone else Rayna would hear platitudes and sympathies that are real but make her feel no better, but from Juliette she feels the smallest bloom in her chest that maybe all is not lost and it surprises the hell out of her. She didn't know how bad it was, Juliette tells her, what Deacon was capable of, that he would be so terrifying, so dark. She didn't know when he fell off the wagon that he would fucking jump off it and drag Rayna underneath it with him. She feels warm tears roll down her cheeks for the first time since she's been in the soulless room and words tumble out of her mouth that tell stories of days she didn't think she would see again, days that have haunted her all these years. He would call her when he was wasted, plead with her to come to him, tell her he would put the bottle down only if he could swap it for her, if she would stay with him. She would leave his bed the next morning telling herself she had to before he woke, but she knew he would be passed out until noon anyway. They would pull him from the fights, Coleman and Bucky and friends he used to have that had stopped calling him over the years as he'd sunk into his isolation that blocked everyone out but her, he was never strong enough to isolate himself from her. Coleman would pin his arms by his sides while he struggled and even though he was almost twice Deacon's size he would be hard pressed to tamper down the rage and the fear and the grief coursing through him. She would yell at him until she was so hoarse Bucky would make her stop before she ruined her throat and left herself unable to sing the next night, and then she would cry. She would cry while she told him he had to stop, begged him not to do this to himself, not to do this to her, and he would cry, and he would stop struggling and sag to the floor and they would take him home. It didn't end though, it never ended; he would reach for her the instant they got through the door and she would come to him, every time she would come to him, and he would kiss her too deeply while Coleman and Bucky stood awkwardly by and he would tell her it would all be okay if she would just come to bed with him and then he would slide his hand under her shirt and she would stop him just long enough to tell Coleman and Bucky that she had this one, that they should go home. Juliette cries too as she listens. She should have known, but no one knew, no one who knows him now and didn't then. He is the perfect shoulder to cry on, the strong one, now. But Rayna knows. Rayna has always known. She asks about her mother, and Juliette cries some more.

#

She only smiles for her children. There is a small reserve of pretence she can draw from, all the years of practice she's had at pretending everything is just fine thank you just absolutely great when she's wanted to scream and tell them all to piss off her life is falling to pieces and she is falling to pieces and Deacon is falling to pieces. She saves it for them, for their innocent faces that look up at her and need their mother to move any part of her body at all to reassure them that she will bake cakes with them and pack their lunches one day again just like she used to. They have suffered, the weeks they spent not seeing her smile, not knowing if she ever would again, listening to the beats of her heart on a monitor like she was some kind of robot that may never twirl them around the living room to songs on the radio. She can't keep up the pretence with anyone else, but she smiles for her daughters. They need her to.

#

Bertha is the only one who talks about Deacon. He is not so much an elephant in the room as a wrecking ball, and whenever she wants to ask about him and the words are almost out of her mouth, she thinks of the placating pats on the arm and the tight smiles she will get instead of answers and so she asks nothing at all. But Bertha talks about him. She sits with her while she winces as her bones slowly knit themselves back together and tells her like a mother would tell a child stories to help them doze when they were sick with fever. How awkwardly he slept in the chair in the corner, how they tried to send him home four days before he would finally allow himself to be discharged, how one of the junior nurses had seen him right back there the very next day, sitting in the waiting area opposite her room, speaking to no one. How she'd found him out in the garden vomiting violently into the gardenia bushes the night she'd flatlined and been technically dead for two tense minutes before they'd brought her back by the skin of her teeth. Bertha rubs her shoulder as she tells her that one. And when she says 'He comes back you know, every day. He's here every day, for you,' Rayna thinks she might set the EKG off all over again.

#

She's been to the morgue in this hospital. Deacon had overdosed on pills and 7-Eleven brandy - it had been the only thing they'd sell him and it had smelt like white spirit when she'd cleaned the shattered glass up off the bathroom floor and wiped it across her face in place of the tears she didn't have left - and was lying in a room on the main ward that was much more clinical than the one she's in now. She has vague, disjointed memories of the other patients and their visitors staring at her as she'd left the room when she could no longer look at his face because she might just finish the job herself and save them both. She remembers how they hadn't bothered to cover their mouths when they'd whispered to each other about the singer whose boyfriend was a drunken mess and did they see he'd ended up in the slammer again for smashing a glass over that poor man's head and what on earth had happened to her shoes for her to be stumbling down the corridor with bare feet like that? She'd walked blindly, away from them, away from him, away from herself, until she'd reached a dead end. When she'd looked up the sign had been stark on the bright white wall, a declaration that the people beyond it had no hope to be salvaged. She'd found herself pushing the door open before she'd known what she was doing. It had been still, peaceful even, and she'd breathed in the smell of formaldehyde and drawn some calm from how it had stung her nostrils. Deacon had been a brandy bottle away from taking her back there, and she'd hated him for it. The porter that had found her hadn't yelled at her when he'd taken her by the arm and helped her trembling legs to move away from what she didn't want to see. She knows full well the reprieve she's been given that has allowed her to narrowly avoid ending up on one of those metal trays herself. She's always known that's the way it will end, that they will lay right there next to each other when the day comes. Whether one of them still has a beating heart is irrelevant.

#

She feels like a child when the physio helps her to hold onto the bars in the room that looks like a school gym. Taking her damn first steps again like she is a child. Deacon missed Maddie's first steps, when she'd been tiny and uncontrollable and smirked just like him when she found something funny. She walks, slowly and carefully, and curses under her breath when she can't do it at first, louder when she still can't. One shaky foot in front of the other. That night is the first she sleeps through until morning.

#

They tell her she can go home the day she feels him standing in her doorway. Her daughters and Teddy have left, saying they need to get the house ready for her to return to, but she knows they understand that she needs a little time, she knows the house has been ready for her to return since the day she left it. She needs some time to say goodbye to what was almost the last place she was more than a memory, to try and find some kind of truce with the thoughts that plague her before she steps out into the life she used to know and tries to fit back into it. She knows instantly it is him, and his face when she looks up is still, he is still. He says nothing. Useless arms hang by his side and he says nothing. She is scared about going home.


	3. Chapter 3

**You are all wonderful, you know how to make a girl want to write! Thank you a whole lot for being so kind. I hope this doesn't hurt your hearts quite so much.**

He almost wishes he still had the dog. He doesn't want company but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to have someone to talk to who can't offer opinions he doesn't want and advice he's not going to listen to and someone whose only facial expressions are I-want-food or walk-me-before-I-pee-on-your-floor and not she's-toxic-for-you or how-did-you-not-guess-it-was-your-baby. It wasn't like he knew what he wanted - except he did, he wanted Rayna, he always wanted Rayna - but he knew what he didn't need, and that was everyone else exercising their mouths.

#

Her publicist turns up on a Tuesday. There has been talk, she says, and it's such an obvious statement it's ridiculous. Of course there's been talk, the biggest country singer in town gets in a wreck with the man she's been not-seeing for years and she's driving and he's drinking - so they say - and they're both nearly dead when they peel the side of the car back like a sardine tin. She'd been unconscious by the time the crowds had gathered but they were there, behind a line of police who tried to stop them taking pictures with their phones but word spreads fast in Nashville when it comes to Rayna Jaymes and Deacon Claybourne and when they turn his car into scrap metal and they're side by side in the middle of the night when it happens, well, there is talk. Bucky sits and looks into his coffee mug uneasily when the publicist tells her they want to put out an interview - nothing too strenuous, just a phone call to ask her some questions, and she'll mediate the whole thing - set some rumours to rest, address the gossip. What were they doing in East Nashville well after midnight, was she going home with him? Why was she driving his car, were they together - _together_ together - before it happened? Rayna laughs loudly with no humour at all when the publicist says they want to ask her straight up whether Deacon is drinking again. Her four-letter reply would have to have been starred out if she'd agreed to do the interview before hell froze over.

#

The girls have learnt a new song. It's brand new, not a song she's heard before, and they grin as they tell her that's because they wrote it. They wrote it for her - it's a get well song, about band-aids and ice cream. She makes them sing it again, and her laughter is loud and real when she hears the line about all the dodgy novelty socks she's been wearing since she got out of the hospital. She feels the joy all the way through her veins, and she tells them she loves them more than Daphne loves the stuffed panda in the tutu that sleeps on her bed and more than Maddie loves that damn Juliette Barnes record. They play it again while they sit on either side of her, three spoons taking turns to dip into a tub of Strawberry Cheesecake Ben and Jerry's, and she knows there isn't a thing in the world more dear to her than their happy faces.

#

He walks to her house, he doesn't drive. He doesn't drive anywhere. It takes him a while - the fancy part of town is quite the walk - but it's not like he has anywhere else to be and the fresh air is more welcome than he could have imagined. He stands at the end of the path that leads to the front door but he can't bring himself to go any further. He does the same every day for a week.

#

Juliette calls her. It's quick, no rambling chat, just to say hi, see how she's feeling. It's strange, this Juliette-being-nice thing, and she can't get used to it. But she likes it, and she wonders where they will be when things are back to normal, whatever normal is supposed to be now. She wonders if Juliette will revert back into rhinestone-bitch or if maybe the events of late have changed her irrevocably. She calls her. Asks how she is. Tells her she's heard she played the Bluebird again, that she's re-hired Glen. And when she hangs up she moves slowly, breathing through the protests her body makes, to the record player across the room and digs through the discs in the box next to it. She finds the one she's looking for, the one Deacon all but threw at her in a bout of annoyance, and sits back down, pulling her Grandmother's blanket around her legs. Maybe Juliette really does have it in her. She picks up a pen and starts to write, and she doesn't stop until the girls come home from school and create their own lemonade and cookies whirlwind in the kitchen.

#

He has no idea what he's supposed to do now. Does he send her birthday cards? Should he be teaching her about staying away from boys and getting good grades in school? Who drops her off at her prom, him or Teddy? Or neither of them, are dads not supposed to drop their daughters off at their prom and make them lose all credibility? Does he have any say at all in her college education, where she gets her first job? He finds himself worrying about helping her with her homework - he's never been very academic. He can write a shit hot song but he isn't really sure what algebra is, he skipped those classes in school to sneak into the open mic afternoons at that bar in town that always looked like a fog machine had thrown up in it. He hasn't been to see her, he doesn't know how to and it isn't fair, on her, on Rayna. Rayna. He feels like his gut has been sliced open again when he thinks of her. He doesn't know where to start.

#

She has a scar that stretches from her chest about seventy-seven miles down her body. It is a neat line, impressively so, still red and inflamed, and it feels funny when she touches it. They told her it would heal to almost nothing - they've taken the stitches out, who knew how many stitches it takes to stop your stomach bursting back open? - eventually, and she isn't sure when 'eventually' is, but it looks better than it did. Daphne sees it one day when she's doing the stretches they taught her in the physiotherapy sessions, and asks with wide eyes if that is the only scar she has. She's been wearing a lot of jumpers since she came home.

#

The band have always thought Maddie is Deacon's. They've never said anything, none of them. Rayna has played with the same band for years, she trusts them, they're good friends, they're good musicians. Deacon had been in his final rehab stint - and Jesus was it a long one - when she'd started craving sunflower seeds. She hates sunflower seeds. She did then, she does now. Deacon loves them. He's never gone on the road without an obscenely large stash of them in his bag, right from their very first tour together when all they had to class it as a 'tour' was a beat up guitar and an old mini bus they borrowed from his cousin and drove from place to place trying to get gigs. She'd been sick with Maddie, really sick, for months. The band couldn't get through a rehearsal without her running for the side of the stage and throwing up the breakfast she hadn't been able to finish. They'd taken to keeping a bucket next to the steps for when she couldn't get as far as the bathroom, which she'd stopped protesting about after the first few weeks and a few close calls. They'd been jovial with her about all the green faces, but had exchanged worried glances and brought her glasses of water and the vitamin tablets Adria had taken when she'd had her first baby. They knew she was fragile, and not just because she was starting to get a swollen belly and a thumping pain in her back. They'd been there through it all, the last minute panics when Deacon still hadn't turned up and the crowds were on their third beers getting restless and Rayna was pacing and insisting that he would show up, he would. They'd seen her sob so hard she'd made herself sick for very different reasons when he'd been gone for hours and they couldn't find him, and seen her cold and seething when he'd eventually shown up passed out behind the bins in the parking lot of some bar so filthy you needed a tetanus shot with your whiskey chaser. They'd been worried about him too, they'd been as close to him as they were to her for a long time and he'd left a gaping hole in their tour, but they knew they were only aware of the half of what he was putting Rayna through. Bucky had shot her a look when she'd tucked into the seeds. She couldn't keep anything down, even water made her queasy, but the way she'd munched on them like she was starving had made him stop what he'd been doing and smile at her. 'What are you looking at?' she'd asked around a mouthful and Johnny the drummer had been the one to let out a low whistle and pluck one from the packet. 'You sure that isn't Deacon's kid in there?' he'd asked, grinning at the rest of them and popping the seed into his mouth, and when her face had turned white he'd looked mortified. That was the first and the last time any of them mentioned it. To her, at least.

#

Teddy kisses her when she's wearing the Superwoman jumper Tandy bought her as a joke for Christmas. She's sitting on a chair in the kitchen that he'd pulled up to the counter when she'd insisted she help with dinner because it had been weeks since she'd _done_ anything. He hands her one of the blunt knives and gets her chopping the soft vegetables, not the carrots or the onions, and when she has trouble with the courgette he comes up behind her and closes his hand over hers, and she should see it coming but she doesn't. She is only thinking about the courgette and how good it feels to be useful even if it's the kind of useful that isn't real, like when she lets Daphne stir in the chocolate chips even though she could do it faster and she knows half the packet will end up smeared around her mouth and will never make it into the cookie dough. Teddy's hand stops what it's doing and doesn't move from hers, and when she turns to look at him with a question on her lips he presses his own to them instead and she never does get it out. It takes her a moment because she is frozen with the surprise of it, but she stops him, pushing him away gently with the hand that isn't holding the knife. His look of disappointment makes her stomach drop and she tells him she's sorry and she means it, she is sorry, but he walks away and turns his back on her and carries on chopping the onions with the proper knife, the one for people who haven't still got the shakes six weeks after they were tipped upside down on the side of the road. 'Is there anything you won't forgive him for?' Teddy asks, still slicing, and she waits for him to go on. 'You almost died Rayna. And still….' He doesn't need to say anything else so he doesn't. She cuts the courgette into tiny pieces.

#

Coleman didn't know. Not officially, anyway. He'd had his suspicions, they were partly his motivation for telling Rayna she had to extract Deacon from her life, but she never told him and he didn't ask. It was for his own good, he says, her letting him go, he would never have gotten dry if she hadn't, if he hadn't told her all the reasons she had to and given her such good ones - ones that made her feel guilty and selfish and irresponsible - that she had no choice. She was fire to him, and he kept playing with it. Coleman had known she was good for him too, that amongst all the fire was a girl who loved him fiercely and would tap dance to the end of the earth for him. But he would never have stopped if he'd known every time that she would be there, that he could manipulate her into scraping his sorry bollocks from the gutter again and again. She was all he wanted anyway so if she was on the end of his puppet string no matter how many times he tried and failed and failed harder, why would he keep trying? Deacon doesn't look at him as he listens to his explanation. He sits on his porch steps and stares straight ahead at the woman watering her hydrangeas across the road. He doesn't know what part he's more furious about, and he doesn't know what part hurts most. He doesn't have Coleman to thank that she didn't cut him loose for good.

#

Tandy takes her on her first trip outside. It feels like she has been in a prison, she realises when she is no longer breathing in air conditioning or the expensive pot pourri that lives in the bowl next to the couch where she feels like she's spent forever. She'd been apprehensive about going out, some strange and irrational worry that Tandy tells her isn't irrational at all, she's been through a lot, but once she is there it's wonderful. They drive to the park they used to play in as children, and eat cream buns on a bench. It's the second time she's been in a car since the accident, once on the way home from the hospital, and she digs her nails into the seat so hard her knuckles turn white.

#

Stacey turning up on his doorstep throws him. Truthfully, if a little guiltily, he hasn't thought about her once, but Scarlett told him she'd called her when he was in the hospital, she'd heard the news, she was worried. She hadn't been to visit him in there and he's glad, he wouldn't have been able to get out more than a couple of words because he was too busy hoping desperately that Rayna would one day flip her hair over her shoulder again like he loved watching her do and everything else in his whole life was laughably insignificant in comparison. She doesn't ask to come in, but he offers and she stands self-consciously inside the front door. She asks him how he is and when he tells her he's fine, a little stiff, nothing more, she makes small talk and all he can think is that she's stood in the exact spot he'd kissed Rayna goodbye the morning after she'd told him she loved him and his world had reduced and expanded only to what her skin felt like under his fingertips. He doesn't want Stacey to stand there. He makes her coffee so she will move into the kitchen.

#

Bucky brings her demos. They listen to them together, the songs that Scarlett and Will have been recording that they will filter down and brush up and choose for each of their albums. Rayna is excited. She can't wait to get back to work, and the corners of his eyes crinkle when she tells him so. He can't wait either, he admits, and she sees in his eyes the sincerity. She doesn't miss the fear it is laced with that he has felt for seven weeks straight. She kisses him on the cheek and presses play on the next track.

#

It's been fifty-three days since he's had a drink. He's back there now, in the small numbers. He is repulsed when he counts them, and he counts them often, more times a day than the number of days themselves. Counting them helps him to stay sitting carefully on the wagon holding onto the sides and making sure he doesn't topple off. He won't though, he knows he won't. Not after what's happened. Not after looking at Rayna's eyelashes resting against her cheeks for so long that he had begun to be afraid he might forget the exact colour of her eyes. He counted her bruises like he counts his days. He doesn't even want to look at a bottle of Jack.

#

She picks up her phone and scrolls to his number. She has it on speed dial - she always has - but she doesn't actually want it to ring, she just wants to look at it, so she fishes it out of her contacts. She wishes she could hit the call button.

#

Teddy hates Deacon. _Hates_ him. Not the kind of vague dislike you feel for people who cut in line in front of you at Taco Bell, or people whose children drip ice lollies on your Louboutins in the playground. Not even the kind reserved for friends who betray you or family members who only turn up when they want something and talk shit about you the rest of the time. Teddy _hates_ Deacon. Rayna has always been aware of this fact, but even when they've been staring each other down a hair's breath from launching fists into faces and it's all because of her and she's really never meant for any of it to be that way, she's known it was what it was. What it is now is different. What it is now is that Deacon has fucked up, big time, the kind of big time Teddy has waited for so he can say 'SEE?', and open his arms for her to run into, but the woman Teddy has always wished would love him back still loves the fuck-up instead and he knows now what it feels like to lose her even if you can't lose what was never yours. What it is now is that Teddy has taken not only the woman Deacon loves but his child and Deacon has missed walking down an aisle holding her hand and spinning her around in a white dress and he's missed tooth fairies and bedtime stories and sleepless nights he would give anything to have back. Deacon isn't too fond of Teddy either.

#

His sister turns up not long after Rayna's release from the hospital. She tells him while she hoists a picnic basket of homemade jams and an entire bag of saltwater taffy, the flavour they used to eat as kids, from the backseat of her banged up old Beetle that it took her this long to come see him because she's been sorting a few things out. It turns out that 'a few things' was her quitting her job and packing up her life and moving it and all the bamboo bangles she bought on that trip to Indonesia into Scarlett's spare room. She's here to keep an eye on him, he knows it even though she doesn't say it, but she's the only one who doesn't tell him he should stay away from Rayna, or that he shouldn't, or that he'd better have nipped the drinking in the bud, or anything at all. His tongue turns blue from the taffy and he laughs for the first time since before _I think you might be my father_ when she holds up a compact mirror to show him.

#

He picks up his phone. The voicemail from her is still on it, the one she left him when her father was in the hospital, the one that tipped everything on a slide that was to bring them back to where they belonged. He listens to it. And then he sits on his porch steps and listens to it again, and again. It is dark outside when his battery beeps at him to tell him to stop. Some things never change, he'd told her. Damn right.

#

Scarlett calls before she arrives. She brings cupcakes, one for Rayna - Deacon told her red velvet and cream cheese were her favourite, bastard, she's been resisting them for years - and one each for Maddie and Daphne, chocolate with mint frosting. She has never been inside Rayna's house before, and the way she tries not to stare makes Rayna smile. 'Would you like some tea?' she asks. She has made a lot of tea lately. People stop by every day, and she is finally strong enough to pull the lid from the tin of sugar without using every last drop of energy she has. She leaves Scarlett to look as much as she wants to while she sets the kettle to boil. She has come over to tell her about the new music she's been writing, she says, how much she is looking forward to Rayna being well again so they can talk albums and tours and which single to release first. But she also tells her, sandwiched none too subtly in between, that she has been going to see Deacon a lot. What she says is that she has been making sure he's ok, but Rayna knows that what she means is she's been making sure he isn't swimming in the bottom of a whiskey glass. She is terrified that is the place he has returned to, but she has had no one other than Coleman to ask, and she worries that Coleman lies to her when he says Deacon is fine, that he's protecting her from a far uglier truth while she recovers. So she asks Scarlett. The relief overwhelms her. It's been fifty-five days. Rayna knows it's the real reason Scarlett came over, but she asks her to play the new songs for her, and while she sits and listens with a smile on her face, she is grateful.

#

She used to tell him she hated that she loved him, she'd say it over and over again while he pinned her against the wall and kissed her neck and made everything feel so much better. She hated that she loved him. She hated that he tasted of spirits and cigarettes and that he would beat the shit out of any man that looked at her the wrong way and a lot of men looked at her the wrong way, and she hated that he always told her he was sorry between bouts of vomit in the bathrooms of nameless grimy motels they'd be staying in. Sorry means not doing it again, she would tell him, something her mother used to say when she would eat all the little marshmallows in the Lucky Charms box when she thought no one was looking and would promise never to do it again when she was caught. She hated that everyone told her how stupid she was being, she hated that he'd left her, the Deacon she knew that was everything to her, that he'd become this Deacon who was a stranger, she fucking hated that more than any of it. She hates now that it's happened like this, hates it, but she can never hate that she loves him still. She doesn't need them to tell her anymore that she's a lost cause, because she tells herself. Over and over again. He came back to her, the Deacon she knows that is everything to her.

#

It's windy outside the day he comes. The manicured trees in the garden are blowing every which way, and Rayna wriggles closer to Tandy on the couch under the blanket they share. The knock at the door comes when Richard Gere is halfway up the fire escape, and it is Tandy who answers it. Rayna hears muffled voices, one her sister's and the other pleading. Deacon's face is anxious when he walks into the room behind a dubious-looking Tandy, and his eyes fix on Rayna immediately and lock with hers. She feels the breath leave her patched-up lungs and barely hears Tandy tell him 'Just a few minutes, she needs to rest.' She has done nothing but rest. She has done nothing but wait for him, and now he is here. He sits down carefully, and she thinks he is still delicate but she realises quickly he is taking care for her sake. She must look worse than she thought, because he swallows a lot as he takes in her face, looks over her arms where they rest on top of her covers, almost winces at how hollow her collarbone has become. But there is something else in his expression too, in the way he drinks in her eyes, the small tentative smile on her lips. 'Ray,' he says, just a whisper. Just a few minutes turns into the rest of the day, and Tandy has to be coaxed into leaving him there with her sister who still has to be helped into bed at night. They don't talk - there is so much to say that they say nothing at all, nothing more than ascertaining the other is healthy. They sit. The DVD menu stays on the screen so long it starts again by itself, so they watch Pretty Woman, and he chuckles when Vivian pings the snail across the table. Rayna thinks it's the best sound she's ever heard. She offers him half of her blanket and he accepts, sitting close enough that he isn't touching her but that she can feel the heat from his leg. They are greedy; they take in the others' breaths, he revels in how she wraps her arms around herself, she loves the hole in one of his socks when he puts his feet up on the coffee table. Then the movie finishes, and he makes her tea, and watches her as she blows on it to cool it down. She studies his face, notices how worn he looks, the burst capillaries in his eyes that belie how bad things have been for him. And then he reaches his hand out and silently traces the healing cut that spans from her ear down to her chin with his forefinger, so gently she is amazed she can feel it. But she does feel it. She feels it in every single nerve ending her body possesses, right down to her little toes. 'I'm so sorry,' he tells her in a voice so broken he couldn't say anything else even if he knew what else to say. As the sun sets outside he strokes the bruise on her forearm, the stubborn one that just won't go away, touches the lump on her hand where one of her many drips had been, and she leans her head on his shoulder. When he leaves he doesn't say goodbye, he doesn't need to. The look he gives her as he closes the door tells her he will be back.


	4. Chapter 4

**Ya'll make me happier than the first time we heard Rayna call Deacon 'babe'. Thank you for being so wonderful with your reviews, if I could kiss you all I would. For some reason these chapters are getting longer and longer...je suis sorry for your square eyes.**

Juliette Barnes owns every record Rayna Jaymes has ever released. She keeps them in a spare room next to piles of sheet music she knows how to play without looking and the books she doesn't let anyone see her reading for fear of damaging her ice queen reputation. Not a single one of them has ever won the Booker Prize and most of them feature gazing-people on the covers. Rayna Jaymes had been all that was allowed on the record player in the Barnes household. She'd play them when her momma was out, which was most of the time, and she'd play them when her momma was there, in her rare moments of sobriety. They'd dance together those times, Jolene twirling her around the room she cleaned with a wet cloth and a dustpan when she was the head of the household, singing along at the top of their lungs. And then one day Juliette had put the records in a box. She'd looked at the face staring back at her and she'd felt fury in her veins that it wasn't her, that she was in Walmart jeans with bitten nails and not on the cover of an album with perfect hair and a perfect life. She was good. She knew she was good. It wasn't fair - nothing about Juliette's life was fair. She hated Rayna Jaymes. She'd put the box in a cupboard under the stairs the day she'd got the bus to Alabama with a bag slung over her shoulder. Dust mites make her sneeze when she pulls back the lid. She sits cross-legged on the floor and rifles to the one she wants, the one her momma had brought back for her when she'd been gone for a week and Juliette had told their seedy neighbour she was in bed with the flu so no-one called Social Services. She never did find out where Jolene had been that week, but she'd never taken the wrapping off that record. It lays in a crinkled heap on the floor as she turns up the volume.

#

Rayna makes him feel like a kid with a crush. She always has. He's gotten butterflies every time she's walked into a room, since the very first time he'd been in Watty White's office in the middle of Music Row, clutching his second-hand guitar and waiting for her to hear him play and decide if she was going to let him join her band. Watty got around - he still does - Deacon has thanked his lucky stars ever since that he'd played that grimy little backstreet bar the night he'd shown up. He had a project, he'd said, a girl with a set of pipes on her and a knack for writing a catchy tune. She was sixteen years old and twice as bolshy, and she needed a guitarist who could keep up with her. He hadn't, Deacon understood much later, just meant musically. Rayna Jaymes had strutted through the door in the shortest shorts he'd ever seen, a whirlwind of copper hair, holding her head up high like she'd already been famous for years even though she'd never so much as had a paid gig, and he'd been lost. He hadn't let her know it, of course he hadn't, if she was mouthy he was an arsehole, he gave every bit as good as he got and he got a lot - their fights started early and they started hard. He loves their fights. Not the bad ones, the really bad ones where they know exactly which jugular to cut, but the ones about song choices and guitar riffs, clingy ex-girlfriends and that dress he'd ripped by accident once that would never be the same. He hadn't let himself know it in the beginning either, fool that he was - everyone else had seen it coming like a truck though, the gaggle of musical misfits they amassed around them. The more they'd teased, the more irritated Rayna had become, and all the harder Deacon had fallen. Vince had warned him as soon as it had become clear he should throw his own impure thoughts out of a very big window and lock it shut - told him he'd be a lifer if he so much as touched her. Vince, it turns out, had been right. Years after their first fight, their first make-up, their first everything, he gets that feeling in his belly, the one where everything feels like melting brown sugar, when he sees the flash of her hair, when her ridiculously long legs appear before the rest of her. They are people who kiss in corridors, love on stolen time, hold in the words they don't need anyway. He tingles everywhere when she touches him, like she licks a trail of gunpowder over his skin and lights a match, and God help his sorry soul when she kisses him. It's always been so. She's come to see Bucky. He looks at her across the room and blushes when she catches his eye, scuffs the toe of his boot on the side of a crate. There's only one thing that will ever make Deacon Claybourne happy, and he thought he'd lost it a long time ago. She's proven him wrong a lot over the years.

#

Sarah Claybourne is almost as fond of Rayna as her brother is. She's seen her naked almost as many times too, a proclivity they'd shared for getting drunk and skinny dipping in the middle of the night when she'd been on the verge of making it and Deacon had been perfecting his addiction to her Southern tan and the way she stomped her foot when she cussed. Sarah had taken the piss out of him for following her around like a tv commercial puppy dog, and she'd stolen Rayna for road trips out to the fields where they passed cigarettes back and forth while she told stories about him being chased by a stampede of cows as a kid and the many dubious haircuts he'd had in school. Rayna had been falling like a tonne of bricks, unable and unwilling to stop the flutters in her stomach that would have made her roll her eyes if they hadn't made her feel so damn good. It had been Sarah who had told him he should move to Nashville, when he'd played his first chords on a guitar he'd borrowed from their uncle Jerry, and it had stuck, right up to him calling her from a payphone to tell her the address of his first place, proudly complete with Nashville postcode. He'd been there a year before she'd turned up at his apartment with a rucksack and a bag of guitar picks. Birthday presents, she'd told him, to make up for the three she'd missed while she'd been no-one-was-really-sure-where - including her, having seen a lot of beaches from behind a haze of pot smoke. He'd gotten postcards, a few scribbled words that began 'Baby brother' and ended 'Don't get any girls pregnant' with no need for her to sign her name. She'd been at their first show, the person who'd hugged him afterwards and bought the celebratory round of drinks. Rayna had loved her instantly. It had been a long time since Sarah Claybourne had been in town. She passes a cigarette to Rayna where they lie on their backs in Rayna's garden and it hurts when she coughs, a little more when she laughs at herself. 'Been a while?' Sarah asks, and she grins. 'Apparently these days I'm well-behaved.' Sarah's laugh is dirty and loud, issued between drags. 'Bullshit,' she says.

#

She still wears one of his sweaters. She's worn it for years, ever since she stole it from him one chilly summer evening while they'd toasted s'mores over firewood in their little garden. Teddy has never known it's Deacon's sweater, though she's always been careful not to wear it much around him because it feels like a kick in the teeth she doesn't think is fair. She'd peeled it off Deacon more times than she'd put it on herself, and she'd put it on herself a hell of a lot of times. It had never stopped smelling of him, it made no difference which of them was wearing it. It had been the most comfort she'd managed to find when he'd gone into rehab the first time around. By the third she'd thrown it into a box along with all the photographs of them together that she couldn't bear to look at, however temporarily. By the fifth she'd taken to wearing it on days off, around the house, on her way to a photoshoot when she'd have to leave it on a chair while she changed into something decidedly less comfortable. It's the sweater Teddy packed into her hospital bag. The one she'd worn on the day she went home. It keeps her hands from shaking on the first day Bucky helps her back through the doors into Edgehill's glaringly white reception.

#

Daphne asks about Deacon. 'Isn't he still your boyfriend?' is what she says, and so innocent is her concern that Rayna withers, as she often does at the mercy of her daughter's frank questions and bouncy pigtails. She gets ice cream out of the freezer and clambers onto one of the kitchen stools that are too high for her, lifting the lid off and proffering it towards her mother. 'Mandy Johnson who's two years above me in school broke up with her boyfriend last week and she hasn't stopped crying about it, and they'd only been going out for three days. Her big sister said girls eat ice cream when boys break their hearts,' she says matter-of-factly, licking a piece of toffee off her spoon. Rayna has to turn away and pretend to be searching for napkins so Daphne doesn't see her try to choose between laughing and crying. When she turns back to her she has composed herself, and tells her daughter that boys are bad news whether you're eleven or twenty-five or a hundred and three, and that maybe they should get kittens and keep themselves out of trouble.

#

The manager of the café Deacon had worked at when he'd been trying to save up enough money for busfare to Nashville and a deposit on a pokey room he'd find when he got there told him he'd never make it. He was a decent guitar player, that much was true, Mr Wilson had said, but pipedreams were a waste of the day and he was nothing special. Might as well get himself to plumbing school and put those hands to better use making a decent living like a real man. Years later, when Rayna had notched up a respectable amount of top five hits and couldn't add shows to her first headline tour faster than they would sell out, Mr Wilson had made the trip on the Greyhound with his wife, who had always been a fan of country music. They'd had good seats, right up front and to the left. When the lights had come up after the show and Mrs Wilson was gushing about how good that young boy who used to wipe the tables was with that there guitar, he had waved a hand in her face and watched as Deacon had jumped down the stairs after Rayna at the side of the stage and grasped her waist. She'd turned to him, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him with everything she had, kissed him like there was no-one else in the world, and Mr Wilson had felt his mouth drop open. Kid had made it alright. A two-hour sold out show to screaming fans and the biggest star around crazy in love with him. What a waste of time plumbing school would have been.

#

Marshall Evans isn't Rayna's favourite person. He got off not so much on the wrong foot with her as having one foot lodged firmly up his backside while he kicked her in the face with the other one. She'd been undeterred though, figuring he probably had a big car and other considerably smaller assets to make up for. She'd won him over, as was her tendency with people who underestimated her, but it didn't make her skin crawl any less whenever he was in the same room. Sitting in his office while he offers condolences for what she's been through wouldn't count as a desirable situation to be in, except that she's so happy to be back at work - even if it is just for half an hour, a taster of what she is so desperate to get back to - that even his Sympathetic-Face doesn't irritate her. They talk about her album, the studio time that will come soon, she's been writing again she says, Liam is on a plane back to town. They talk about the new label, when they will showcase Will. It is as she is heading out of the door, Bucky ahead of her already in the hallway, that he lightly grips her arm. 'Deacon Claybourne,' he says, his signature insincere smile still on his face, 'stay away from him.' 'Excuse me?' she asks, and his fingerprints are still white on her arm when she pulls it free. 'He's bad news. The label won't be using him again. I prefer my artists not to end up dead at the hands of a drunk with a guitar.' She doesn't bother to tell him what a prick he is as she slams the door.

#

She married Teddy on a Friday. It was a small ceremony, church, white dress, three-tier cake, sure - Tandy had stepped in when she'd said they could just head down to the registry office in an afternoon couldn't they? - but she hadn't wanted to shout it from the rooftops, and she sure as hell hadn't wanted the papers calling her a shotgun bride when they found out she was four months pregnant. Teddy had stood with his arms behind his back and a nervous tap in his foot as she'd walked towards him, his jaw slack with happiness, and she'd been happy too, he'd made her tummy feel warm when he'd taken her hand. Her father gave her away - he was happier than both of them, what a narrow escape that she was marrying the Harvard graduate who knew how to wear a suit and not the no-hoper with a hangover she'd been running around after all these years. She'd given him a thin-lipped thank you when he'd delivered her to Teddy, and caught Tandy's eye where she stood next to the altar in her simple shift dress. Her band had been there, hiding their sadness well, relieved all the same that Teddy was a good man who would look after her and wouldn't drag her down to the country jail in the middle of the night and throw up in her purse. Bucky was there, Coleman and the woman he'd married a few years before, both nodding encouragingly at her. When the priest had asked if anyone had any objections, she'd bitten her lip and chastised herself for hoping that maybe just maybe he'd burst through the door and have a white horse parked outside, or at least a truck with tyres that would squeal as he floored the pedals to get her out of there, away from everything that everyone expected of her. The reception had been at Lamar's, and she'd snuck up to her old bedroom when the guests were busy tucking into aperitifs and the champagne that would have given her a headache. The dress she was wearing, handmade silk with pearl beading, flattered her in all the right places - her delicate collarbone, her tiny waist. It fell over her stomach so smoothly that not one of the guests would have had the first idea about the baby growing inside her. Tandy had told her she should wear Mom's dress, but she couldn't. She couldn't put on her mother's dress to marry a man she hadn't spent the last decade of her life in terrible love with. Later, she would realise how ironic that had been, that her mother must have felt the same, that she'd worn the dress with the antique lace trim to say I do when she didn't. If she'd married Deacon she would have worn cut-offs and cowboy boots and they'd have stolen daisies from someone's garden and tied them with a ribbon. She'd pulled her legs up onto the bed and cradled the picture of her and her mother in the battered old frame that lived on her bedside table, her hand absently comforting her belly. Teddy had knocked on the door before he'd come in, and when she'd smiled at him in invitation he'd sat down next to her and she'd enjoyed the feeling of him pulling her into his arms. He'd toyed with the ring on her finger that felt heavy and strange, and run his hand over the glass of the picture frame. She'd kissed him, and she'd meant it, he was a good man, was good for her. Maybe it was all for the best if it was his baby. He could give it a stable home, a family life without Jack Daniels for an uncle. 'We're going to be happy together Rayna,' he'd told her, and she'd believed him.

#

The night Rayna's mother died she'd had trouble sleeping. She'd been sitting up in her bed, strumming the guitar she never went anywhere without, quietly so she didn't wake her father and end up with a telling off. The panic in her gut had been instant when the phone rang. No one called the house at 2am. She'd held her breath while she'd listened to her father's footsteps as he'd thudded down the hall to answer it. She'd heard him swear as he'd passed her door, and she'd wondered whether the noise had woken her mother too. She'd tucked her in that night, kissed her forehead when she told her to sleep well and called her dolly like she always did. Rayna had thought it peculiar when she'd held her face in both her hands as though she was memorising every detail before she'd gotten up to switch the light out. She'd lingered in the doorway, and when she'd told her daughter she loved her, it had been in a murmur so soft she'd barely heard it. But Rayna didn't miss anything, not when it came to her mother. They were inseparable, much to Tandy's annoyance and her father's impatience. She'd taught her to play guitar, they'd written Rayna's first song together, they would put on her high heels and catwalk down the hall of their house, and she'd catch Rayna with every stumble her small feet took. They'd run through the long grass in the woods out of town squealing when it tickled their legs, lay in a clearing the rest of the day while she'd twirl buttercups under her daughter's chin to make her giggle. There was no one in the world more perfect to Rayna than her mother. But she would disappear for days at a time, would call to check she'd done her homework when no one had known where she was for a week and would make her promise over muffled noises of truck horns not to tell Lamar she'd spoken to her. Rayna would hear the fights they had, downstairs in the kitchen in the dead of night. _Where have you been, what are you doing, your children cry for you_. She would take her to the record store when they were supposed to be shopping for school shoes, would buy her Patsy Kline vinyls and they'd play them together and sing until they were hoarse, the shoes forgotten until her father would have to take her the next day. She was beautiful, Rayna's mother. Beautiful and impulsive and impossible. Long red ringlets and a voice so haunted and so pure men would fall at her feet and Rayna worshipped the very ground she walked on. The phone in their house had been one of those old fashioned ones, the kind that rang harsh and shrill. Her father had smashed all her vinyls, later.

The night Rayna had been in the accident the phone in the house had rung at 2am. Maddie had been asleep, peacefully so. Teddy had answered it in the bedroom where he kept his toothbrush for a week at a time. When he'd woken Maddie it had been quietly, the urgency in his voice kept as low as he could dial it. She'd felt the panic in her gut instantly anyway. Teddy takes the girls shopping for shoes. He comes home with four pairs: two practical and two for best that he'd let them choose themselves. He'd had to sway Daphne from the ones with bright butterflies on the sides and Maddie the pair with the too-high heels she knew she wasn't allowed to wear to school. Rayna smiles at them as they parade up and down the hall of their house, catwalk style, showing them off. She smiles at Teddy for the life he has given them.

#

It feels good to be back in the studio. Deacon moves his hand over the mic and breathes in the smell that's been more familiar to him over the years than his own bedroom. Juliette has been making a lot of music since her mother died. She hasn't let anyone else listen to it yet, she tells him, she wanted him to be the first. He is honest when he tells her it's good, and he means really good, the kind of good that is only really found in dark places by people who have art in their soul. He tells her that too, and he's never seen Juliette blush before. She's going to ask Rayna to write with her, she says, and he is caught completely off-guard. 'I know, I know,' she says at his raised eyebrows, 'when did I get so Team Rayna?' He laughs and she falls quiet, her eyes on a sheet of messy words she'd written that morning. They wouldn't stop coming, the words. 'I guess I hadn't wanted to see how similar we were. I thought she had everything I ever wanted, that she was everything I ever wanted to be.' He knows that includes him, that she'd pursued him because he was Rayna's, had always been. 'And now?' When Juliette looks up at him it is with a grim smile. 'And now she's still everything I ever wanted to be. I guess there's no such thing as a silver platter.' They listen to a whole album's worth of songs before she works out how to say he looks well. She knows what an addict looks like, and it isn't the man with ink all over his fingers and bar after bar scrawled on the paper before him.

#

Bucky knew it was coming. From the moment he'd seen the way Rayna's face turned to mush when she'd looked at Deacon that morning, he knew they were back there again. They being all of them - Rayna and Deacon's relationship had an unintentional knack of pulling in everything around it like it was a fifty-foot wide tornado. He'd seen that look on Rayna's face before, and the answering one on Deacon's. The second she asked him to excuse her a moment, not giving him a second glance as she'd bee-lined for the man she'd always dropped everything for, he'd known. It was like being back in time - how many occasions they'd been in the middle of a rehearsal and Deacon's tongue would be on the floor while she looked at him just like that, and one of them had mumbled that everyone should take a break while the other had yanked them out of the room by the hand saying they needed to have an urgent discussion about the set list. Bucky had been there for all of it, the ups, the downs, the locked dressing room doors and the tender kisses on the forehead when they thought no-one was looking, the horrifyingly awful bits when she'd lost so much weight he could make out the shape of her bones and he couldn't remember the last time he'd seen Deacon sober. He's been there for all the bits in the intervening years too, when the longing was so intense it hurt to be around them, when she would go home to her husband and he would turn up the next day with teeth marks on his neck from some woman whose name he hadn't bothered to ask and she wouldn't be able to look at him. When they were 'just friends'. He knows of course that what they have, what they have always had, is in huge part responsible for paying his salary every month. He knows Rayna's popularity is thanks to the way she is able to get people right at their core, make them feel what she's feeling - you can't write love songs if you don't know love, not real songs, not songs that make people want to cry as much as they make them want to whimper like saps and turn up the radio. He's never seen a love close to it, he's as in awe of them as everyone else. But being on the inside means he knows just how dangerous it can be. The night he got the phonecall about the accident he'd still been in his pyjamas when he'd burst through the doors of the ER. He'd known it would come to nothing less. Some things can just never be. He hopes this isn't one of them.

#

Deacon finds Gunnar sitting in the garden of the house he shared with Scarlett. He doesn't live there anymore, not since she flipped the lid closed on the ring he'd bought her and handed it back to him with an apology, but he hangs around hopefully anyway. 'That woman advice you were lookin' for,' Deacon says in greeting, 'still need that?' and Gunnar stares at him for a moment before he beckons to the rickety chair next to him. It turns out neither of them understand women any more than the other, but the Pepsi out of the fridge tastes good going down, and they give up on relationship chat and try instead to get to the bottom of why one person could need as many handbags as Rayna and why Scarlett owns the same dress in three colours.

#

Rayna has never cheated on Teddy. There have been close calls - oh there have been really close calls, a lot of them - but she's never cheated on him. Having Deacon in her band for the better part of thirteen years was both tempting fate and flipping it the bird. She needed him close, it would overwhelm her if he wasn't in her daily life - she would have lasted about a week before she was on his porch ripping her own clothes off and not bothering to kick the door shut on her way in. She would have gone insane with the need for him, the need to be near him. She allowed herself pieces of him, secret pieces - the way he smelt would keep her going for a day, the feel of his hand on her back another two, a joke only they understood would give her three, just a little more time she could force herself to resist him. She'd played those thirteen years hour by hour. But having him close was excruciating - the women that would hang off him and really why should he stop them? She'd despised every one of them, wished their belly button piercings would get caught on the door handle on their way out of his hotel room. And there were the times she would forget, forget that he wasn't hers and she wasn't supposed to be his anymore and she would lean in just that little bit too close and she could feel his breath catch in his throat and would wrench herself away, like a bucket of cold water in her face that she wasn't supposed to, she wasn't supposed to still be in love with him. The close calls re-set the clock, gave her a minus three days depending on how close they'd been that she'd have to punish herself for afterwards. There was one time in Johnny's hotel room when they'd moved the party up there after the bar had pulled its shutters down and kicked them out. The sun had been coming up outside, Rayna on the sliver of floor between the bed and the balcony door where she'd been all night with Deacon, looking up at the cracks in the ceiling with their heads on one pillow, talking about everything and nothing. They hadn't noticed everyone else leave, or Johnny and the couple of stragglers fall asleep on top of the covers on the double bed, not until the snores rang out across the room. They'd covered their mouths to stifle their snickering, but it had died out abruptly when she'd focused on his face and seen his eyes fall to her lips like he was _starving_. He'd been a millimetre from whitewashing every line they'd ever drawn when Johnny had rolled over and farted in his sleep, and they'd been off again, Deacon's head falling onto her chest to muffle his laughter. She'd ruffled his hair until they'd quietened again, but they were chin deep in shark-infested waters and she knew it, so she'd disentangled herself from him, made her way back to her room and acquainted herself with the cracks in her own ceiling until her wake-up call had made her jump. There had been another time in the middle of a show - there had been a lot of those times - when she'd slipped an arm around his neck and she had no idea why she'd done it but the screams from the audience gave her the excuse she needed to keep it there. The air had been thick like the kind right before a thunderstorm when he'd dug his fingernails into her waist and pulled her closer, the guitar a chastity belt between them. But she'd never cheated on Teddy. Emotionally…well that was a different story.

#

Scarlett sits on a swing looking about twelve years old. Rayna wishes she could swing too, but she is perched on a less wobbly wooden table, a scarf wrapped around her neck. How many men thought a diamond on a finger could sort everything out. Deacon had never shut Rayna out of his battles; he'd dragged her into them and sucked her right down with him. The worse things got the tighter his hold on her - Scarlett had been having the opposite problem, and Rayna wasn't sure which was worse. So many times she'd told Deacon he had to get his shit together, had to, for everyone's sake but his own more than anyone's. Gunnar had tried to patch up his shit with a diamond ring. She tells Scarlett they need wine. And manicures.

#

They get permission to spend the afternoon together, like they still have to ask their parents if they can play out. They don't go far, neither of them is ready to get in a car with the other and Rayna tires quickly these days, something that doesn't go unnoticed by him, and neither does her frustration about it. She tells him as they walk to the stretch of river closest to her house that she is impatient to pick up the pieces of her life. She doesn't have to tell him that he's the biggest piece. He helps her to sit on the grass, leaning against a low wall next to her. 'Deacon,' she says, after they fall into the silence that is their own version of conversation they've perfected over the years, for better or for worse, 'where do we start?' He doesn't know, he tells her. There is the easy way out - be mad at each other, retreat, undo the careful steps they've taken to get back to the other. It had taken them thirteen years, what a waste, what a mockery they would make of all the time not spent and the memories not made if they were to take the easy way out. Then there is the hard way. The hard way involves big things like actually _talking_, and tears and smashed plates - Rayna does have a set of horrible china her aunt Annabelle gave her for her wedding that she's been waiting for a reason to get rid of, she tells him, quite seriously, and when he looks at her he knows exactly why the easy way out is no more an option than him getting an I Heart Lamar tattoo around his thigh. The hard way isn't something either of them have the strength for yet. It is the first time, sitting with their shoes off and grass between their toes, that he asks, so cautiously she knows the words almost don't make it out, whether he might one day be able to see Maddie. She knows what he means - they don't have to do the talking thing for her to know that - and she tells him honestly that it's Maddie's call. The cards are on the table now, for all of them, and her daughter - their daughter - has her own decisions to make.

#

Lamar punched Deacon once. Rayna had been at the Country Club, plucking at the napkin on her lap and trying not to sigh out loud as her father had schmoozed a table of businessmen he was trying to cut deals with. Their wives were big fans, as they kept telling her. She'd only agreed to go along because her father had been particularly vocal lately about her lack of family commitment, and she'd felt bad, mostly for Tandy, who squeezed her knee while she fidgeted and tried not to bolt for the door as the wives debated who had the biggest SUV. Deacon had walked in halfway through the cheesecake. Rayna hadn't touched hers, she hadn't touched anything that had come before it either, and she sat and swilled expensive red wine around in a glass until she glimpsed him moving through the tables towards her. He was in jeans with holes in the knees and a white shirt that had seen better days, looking lethally hot, and she'd grinned at him, straightening up in her chair, the napkin falling to the floor. Lamar had been furious - at him for showing up there uninvited, this lowlife his daughter had gotten messed up with, at her for lighting up like a Christmas tree when he took her hand and pulled her to her feet. 'Ladies,' he'd said, tipping his head at them, 'do excuse me, I need to steal Ms Jaymes from you. She's needed elsewhere.' She'd mouthed a 'see ya' to her sister and followed him through the room, but Lamar had been hot on their heels. 'You'll end up in some real trouble one of these days,' he'd hissed blood-red as Deacon had held the emergency exit open for her. 'Don't expect me to fund a college education for the illegitimate child he'll knock you up with.' Rayna had said nothing, the look she gave him negated the need to, but she'd been sure to give the door a good slam on her way through it and to slide her hand into Deacon's so that he saw before it shut in his face. Lamar hadn't had enough though, and he'd stormed out into the parking lot after them, grabbing Deacon by the scruff of the neck. Rayna had bellowed at him to go back inside, but he'd ignored her. 'My daughter is not for the likes of you,' he'd snarled, and Deacon had had the good grace not to kick him in the balls and drive Rayna off to Vegas with two fingers out the window. 'And who is she for, Lamar, those Country Club goons you're sweet-talkin'?' Rayna had watched somewhere between horrified and impressed - she'd never seen anyone stand up to her father before. 'You'd know all about that, silver tongue you have - how did you get her to fall for you in the first place?' Deacon had laughed. 'By being a better man than you'll ever be.' And then Lamar had broken his nose. Rayna had sat by his side in the ER, blood all over the shirt she'd taken off in his truck to hold up to his face, not caring that she'd driven him the whole way there in nothing but her underwear and a pair of velvet skinnies. She'd tossed her heels off and hit the pedals in bare feet, and she'd known from the look in his eyes that he was calculating whether he could breathe through his mouth long enough to get her in the backseat before they got to the hospital. 'Think I can still ask him for your hand in marriage?' he'd deadpanned later when they'd taken him into one of the cubicles to clean him up, and she'd laughed so hard she thought she might have to ask for a few stitches herself.

#

He kisses her on the grass. He doesn't know he's going to do it, but they stay out until the air has started dropping colder and the river is still and he's moved closer to her without realising, either sheltering her from the night air or pulled in by some force she has, maybe both. 'That hospital food was lousy,' he jokes, and she replies 'Try having it puréed,' and bumps him in the shoulder, and that's all it takes for him to find his hands in her hair and his lips on hers, a shiver passing from him to her and back again. They stay outside for a long time.

#

Watty has never married. There's been talk over the years that maybe he's gay, his complete lack of interest in women put down by lazy journalists to the easiest of explanations. Of course the real truth is far more complicated - an undying love for a woman who'd driven him all but crazy and then died in a ball of fire that was really quite fitting to her life isn't so easy to sum up in a magazine article. Watty writes songs, still, and they're all about her. Deacon plays his songs - and they're all about her - every third Thursday at The Bluebird for anyone who cares to see the tatters that are left of him; Watty plays his for no-one but himself. He could never have her, there were too many things in their way, and she was the biggest of all of them. He watches Deacon from the back of the bar, leaning against the wall. It's the first gig he's played since the crash. Watty knows that look on his face; it's like looking at the reflection that stares back at him every morning when he brushes his teeth and tells the air that he still loves her, that he always will. He's leaned against this same wall looking at the two of them up on that stage for years, the steel pull they couldn't stop if they tried, and how they had tried. History has ways of repeating herself, but there's one difference in his history and theirs. Rayna sits in a chair, to the side of the room, quiet and still, her eyes fixed only on him. Somewhere in the rhythm his foot taps on the leg of his stool, somewhere at the end of the sad notes he plays, is the hope she's given him that holds more promise than any packed bag and a journey that would never be finished ever could.

#

They didn't bury Vince, he has no grave. A man who couldn't commit to how he liked his eggs cooked can not be put in the ground for all of eternity. They scattered his ashes off a ragged bank at the edge of a lake between his hometown and the city he'd made his life in, the same bank where he'd written all his best songs, the same place he'd lost his virginity and had his first tequila from a brown paper bag. While the priest had said words neither of them had heard, Rayna had gripped Deacon's hand so tight she gave herself pins and needles, anchoring him to her so he wouldn't topple right over the edge. It's here that she finds him when no-one has seen him for three days. Scarlett is worried he's dead, Coleman that he's on a bender, Sarah is sure he's finally lost his mind. Rayna asks none of them for the lift out there. When she calls Juliette it is without hesitation. She spends the car journey watching Rayna watch the passing road out of the window, realising just how little she knows of the history between her and the man she once thought could be hers, how little anyone knows but the two of them. Rayna accepts the help getting out of the passenger seat, not sorry for Juliette to see her vulnerable, and she grasps her hand as she goes to move away and squeezes it, thankful. Juliette tells her to take all the time she needs, parks her car in a lay-by and doesn't watch as she walks slowly away. The path leading up the bank is not steep. Tandy would have a fit all the same if she knew she was climbing it, but she doesn't care. He sits with his back to her and doesn't turn around when he hears her approach. He knows it's her, this is where she's always found him. 'Did you think I'd be a lousy father Ray?' he asks the water he looks out at, and she sinks down next to him. The wind is strong at the edge. It tosses her hair like she is a wild creature. 'No,' comes out in a breath, and she swallows harshly. When he finally turns to look at her she sees tear tracks down his cheeks. 'You had a disease, I didn't know if you were ever going to get better.' His nod is tense, aimed at the ground. 'It was one thing when it was about you and me, but that couldn't be what her life was about too. That choice wasn't about you or me, it was only about her. I put her before both of us.' She looks down at her feet, struggling with the sting of it all. 'There's no-one in the world I would have rather shared her life with than you, Deacon. Every day for thirteen years I've looked at her and seen you.' It's her turn to cry, and she doesn't bother to wipe the tears away. 'I'm sorry,' she tells him. He looks down at her hand, strokes the finger where the ring that deemed she belonged to another man used to live. 'Let's go home,' he says. She takes his hand again as they walk, to anchor him, to be sure he doesn't topple right over the edge.


	5. Chapter 5

**I really do apologise for the angst. I should probably throw in some rainbows. Not my fault though - I blame JEFF, who does not feature in this story but may appear in a subsequent chapter as someone Deacon pings in the face with his guitar strap. **

Grief comes in stages. Grief for a parent no longer around, grief for a loved one in turbulent times. Grief for the years missed with a daughter you never knew was yours, for a woman you thought would always be true. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Rayna guesses Deacon's denial came when she was still in the hospital, his focus on her recovery, not on her lie, not on his part in her lie. There has been little said since, fragments of the conversations they need to have, pieces small enough for them both to manage. But at some point will come words, and with words will come anger. His grief is for a life he never had, and for a life he so desperately wants now, a life that is at his fingertips. It is within touching distance, and it feels like the silk of Rayna's hair and the sound of her laughter deep in the night, the bubbling of a pan on a stove where he cooks dinner for the family he could have. But denial can only last so long.

#

Teddy Conrad rarely drinks. He's not tee total - he enjoys an overpriced spirit at Christmas and a chilled white wine after a tough day as much as the next guy, but on the whole he prefers his booze taken in pleasure rather than in pain. Drinking in pain leads people to places Teddy will not go. His father was there, at the bottom of a black hole face down in self-pity and bourbon. His father had spent every day in a different bar and every night with a different woman, and Teddy had hated him for it, still does. He'd heard the stories before he'd met Rayna Jaymes. She was pretty, God was she pretty, and he'd sat across from her in a civilised restaurant - Italian, recommended by a friend, sea bass to die for - with a civilised glass of Cabernet Sauvignon in his hand, drinking very much in pleasure. He'd heard how she'd missed the Grammys that year because her loser boyfriend had overdosed. He'd heard how her father had flexed his mayoral knuckles and had the journalist fired who had dared to ask him about his daughter's turbulent relationship during a press conference. He knew Deacon Claybourne wasn't nearly good enough for a woman who was so smart she could run rings around even Teddy Conrad, who'd graduated first in his class from Harvard, who was headed for a promising career in real estate. She'd matched him hit for hit when he'd talked about subjects he would usually steer well clear of on a first date, and he'd been impressed and entirely unable to hide it. Their families were Country Club regulars, but he knew the second he sat down with her that she was so much more than that. She'd obviously been brought up with impeccable manners, but she'd tossed her napkin aside instead of putting it on her lap, and when he'd suggested what looked good on the menu she'd ignored him and chosen something completely different. He might not have been able to wow her with talk of music and travel, but he knew she was surprised by him, enough to let him kiss her on the cheek on her doorstep at the end of the night and enough to agree to a second date. Sure, he'd heard the stories. But it wasn't until he got to know Rayna that he understood how bad it really was. The first time he'd met her he'd seen only big wet eyes, lips that met in a perfect pout while she listened to him talk, slender shoulders he draped his jacket around when he walked her home. As he got to know her he came to see the shadows under those eyes, the way she bit her lip when she was worried, the tense set of her shoulders. He came to understand just how much Deacon Claybourne had broken her. With Deacon, he knew she was a girl who would run through puddles holding his hand, would jump when it thundered and swipe at him when he laughed at her for it, would slide her foot up his leg under a table filled with record label execs. With Teddy, she was a girl who sipped champagne at afternoon tea, who talked about books she'd read on her tour bus, wore knee-length dresses on dates. He wishes he'd known her before Deacon Claybourne, maybe things would have been different.

But for Rayna, there is no before-Deacon-Claybourne. There is only now, and Teddy doesn't get to kiss her on the cheek on her doorstep and take her out to afternoon tea now. Teddy knows a drunk. It is only a matter of time before he's back in that place, and now there is so much at stake.

#

Juliette's house feels cold, anonymous. Rayna sits cross-legged on the sofa and thinks about the apartment she'd lived in when she was twenty-three. Juliette has a pool, expensive mirrors on the wall. She'd had a shower that had leaked one pesky cold spray in the middle of the head no matter how hot the rest of the water was, and she'd had a mirror propped against the side of a closet with ragged ticket stubs and old postcards slotted around the edges. And she'd had Deacon. He'd invited himself into her showers and wedged himself between her and the cold spray so she could wash her hair in the warm water, and he'd sat on their bed and watched her put make-up on in the mirror, waiting as long as he could manage before he'd appear behind her and kiss her neck, chuckling at how quickly her half-hearted protests would stop when he pressed her up against the glass. She'd left her father's house with its eight bedrooms and its designer kitchen, slept on friends' floors for a few months, slept in Deacon's bed while he tossed and turned on his couch, far too aware of her presence in the next room to sleep, eventually earned enough money from the gigs Watty was bringing her to rent a room with tiny teeth marks in the carpet. Tour buses had been a luxury to her back then, air conditioning and comfortable mattresses, doors that actually closed. She'd loved every second of her gypsy life. The first place she'd lived with Deacon had been the happiest home she'd ever had. It is the happiest home she _has_ ever had.

Juliette hands her a pen, and it comes with a smile. She's been smiling at Rayna a lot lately. She'd smiled when she'd asked her to write with her, though that one had been apprehensive, loaded with the fear that she might very well say no. Rayna smiles back. 'Let's get to it,' she says. The next time she goes to Juliette's house, she takes her a simple wooden frame. In it is a ticket stub from the first night of their tour together. Juliette puts it on her coffee table and spends all night glancing at it.

#

He calls her. Not to say anything, he doesn't think about words when he dials the number he knows better than his own. He calls her to listen to her not say anything while he doesn't say anything, so that they both know, simply, that the other is there. At some point she falls asleep, and he lays his head on his pillow and does the same, the sound of her gentle breathing over the line lulling him into the most peaceful sleep he's had in weeks. He wakes with the imprint of buttons on his cheek where his phone has been smushed under his face. They do it again the next night, and the night after that. A week later he turns up at her house when it is dark outside, late enough that he knows the girls will be in bed, that if Teddy was there earlier in the evening he will have left for his apartment, the one he moved back into a few weeks ago. He knows that she will be in her favourite football T-shirt and shorts, propped up in her bed reading something trashy while she waits for his call. She doesn't expect him to be outside her front door when she picks up. She lets him upstairs. That night he sleeps next to her, nothing more than sleep. He holds her hand, and wakes with her fingers still twined with his. He leaves early, before the chaos of the school run can begin, before anyone might know he was there. Rayna falls back to sleep when he goes. She wakes later to the imprint of his head on the pillow next to her.

#

Liam is sitting on the couch with his elbows on his knees when she walks into the studio. When he looks up she sees relief on his face, and she is taken aback for a moment - time has passed since the accident, people have stopped treating her like she is fragile - she no longer _feels_ fragile - and she is starting to forget what worry and sympathy looked like on their faces. But Liam is Liam. He pulls her into him and she relaxes, as she so often does around him; some of the tension drains from her shoulders and she feels rather than hears him laugh. It is a laugh filled with words he won't say, because words, other than those he writes and sets to melodies, are not Liam's thing. 'You had me worried there.' She laughs too. 'I had myself a little worried, if we're honest. But look,' she flexes her fingers, twists her neck around in a circle, 'I'm shiny and new.' The smile he gives her is genuine. They sit side by side on the couch they'd been getting better acquainted on when Bucky had walked in on them and done his awkward dance while Rayna had tried not to blush. Such a short time ago but it feels like an age. How much has changed. 'So you ditched me,' he says, and she knows he's only half joking. She sighs and leans back. 'I did. I'm sorry. You know we probably would have gotten sunburn and been miserable anyway,' she says. 'Sunbathing wasn't what I had planned…' He nudges her knee with his and she knows all is forgiven, but she feels him looking at her. 'So… d'you ditch me for Deacon?' He doesn't say it accusingly, doesn't betray any hurt if he feels any. The look she gives him is all the answer she has, and he nods and fiddles with a frayed patch on the knee of his jeans. 'You back together?' She shrugs. 'We were, before…everything.' He considers her for a moment. 'Everything?' And so she tells him. Everything. Something about Liam makes her talk, and looking at his boyish face and the dimples he hides beneath the scruff meant to make him look older, she has no idea what it is. Maybe because he listens, with no agenda - other than the potential bonus of getting her into bed that he has never tried to hide - and maybe because he's one of few people that doesn't try to impose opinions on her. At some point along the way he'd come to care about Rayna Jaymes with her SUV, and all the parts of her that surprise him. At some point she'd come to care too. They have new songs to write, she says eventually, and he wipes her tears with his sleeve and pulls her to her feet.

#

Teddy remembers the first time he saw Rayna sing with Deacon. She'd been his girlfriend by that time, a few weeks into the relationship that he was sure would be the most important one of his life, the relationship that had already surpassed everything he'd known before it. He was besotted with her, every word that came out of her mouth, every smile she gave him, every inch further into her life she let him. But as he'd sat in the audience at a private show they'd played at a small venue downtown, witnessing their first gig together since Deacon had got out of rehab - four times, no less, and Teddy didn't know how he could look her in the eyes - he'd realised like a slap in the face that he wasn't the only one besotted. It had made him feel distinctly uncomfortable watching them, like he and everyone else in the room was being let in on a moment too intimate to be witnessed. Deacon hadn't taken his eyes off her. She had at least looked like she'd tried for all of thirty seconds not to gaze right back at him, but whatever resolve she'd attempted to hold onto had withered as his fingers had created sounds on the guitar that even Teddy had to admit were hypnotic. They'd played songs they'd clearly written together when Deacon was the one who had woken up every morning with her in his arms, when he'd been the one with free reign to kiss her, was allowed to look at her like she was something he wanted to devour. He'd looked at her like that anyway, his body language hiding nothing - he'd sat on a stool with his knee touching hers, his shoulders turned towards her, his head so close that she could surely feel his breath. Teddy had not enjoyed it. Nor had he enjoyed the way Rayna had blinked up at Deacon, bitten her lip while he sang - to her, he sang to her - or how she'd made no move to back away from him, given no resistance to the way he'd stared at her mouth. Teddy had gone up to her after they'd finished their set, had had every intention of wrapping his arms around her and showing Deacon Claybourne who she belonged to, but she'd been busy talking to him, his guitar still in his hand, and when she'd eventually noticed Teddy she'd been deliberate in avoiding his touch, in putting as much distance between them as she could without leaving the room. She hadn't told Deacon about them. He knew it as soon as he saw her sheepish expression, how she'd ducked her head and mumbled something to Deacon about him being a friend of Tandy's. Deacon had stayed sober for a few weeks that time. Right until he'd found out she was dating him.

#

There had been talk while Rayna was still in the hospital about cancelling the rest of the tour. They'd postponed the immediate shows, Juliette's bereavement and her newfound sense of decency towards Rayna preventing her from doing them alone. Bucky had sat with her one day when she'd been starting to feel like herself again, and she'd known from the way he kept clearing his throat and re-reading pages of magazines that there was something he'd wanted to say. 'It's the tour, isn't it?' she'd asked, and he'd been downcast when he'd said the label wanted to pull the remaining dates. 'No,' had been her only answer. 'You tell them no.' It is three months since the accident. She has pink, soft scars in curious patterns, aches in her bones when she wakes in a morning that fade by the time she's taken a shower. She is ready. The dates have been re-set, tickets re-allocated to loyal fans who have waited patiently, worriedly. She needs to get back into the driver's seat, Marshall tells her, and even he winces when he realises his choice of words. Bucky arranges a few small gigs in venues that will be gentle with her, nothing too feisty, nothing too far away, and she is nervous when she asks Deacon if he will play with her. He squeezes her hand the first night as he steps onto the stage at her side.

#

He's going to the cabin for a few days he says, there are too many eyes on them now that they're both back in the game - journalists have been turning up everywhere, outside the handful of gigs he's played, following her to Edgehill, back from the market. They shout things she tries not to hear, things about her and Deacon, about what they suspect was a lover's tiff that got them into the accident. Neither of them have confirmed or denied a relationship, and Rayna is thankful now that at least they hadn't made it to the red carpet, that they'd so narrowly avoided telling the world they were together again, just to hammer the nail in. She doesn't know what they are now. He doesn't know either, but he does know he hates the attention, he always has, even when they were happily together and everyone knew it. She turns up as he's pulling a box of maggots from the fridge to fix to his fishing rod. He's been there for almost a week, no contact with anyone but the crickets and the occasional bear he in the woods behind the lake. Rayna always hated him keeping maggots in the fridge. 'Right next to the butter Deacon, really?' she'd say, standing in front of the open door cooling her bare legs. 'It's not like you eat butter,' he'd retort, and then he'd slide his arms around her and reach for the tub, opening the lid and dangling one in front of her. He'd loved the panicked sound she'd make and the way she'd slap at his chest to get him to move out of the way so she could escape, but he'd throw it back and would have her cornered, the cold air puckering their skin while he kissed her into forgetting all about maggots.

She doesn't knock - she doesn't need to, the cabin is as familiar to her as it is to him. 'Needed a little fresh air Ray?' he asks. She shakes her head as she moves towards him, saying nothing. It is he who forgets about the maggots. She kisses him first, and the noise that rumbles from the back of his throat makes her knees melt and her fingers reach up to pull at his hair. There is not an inch between their bodies, and he makes just enough of one to peel her shirt from her shoulders. He's careful when he picks her up, and when he lays her down on his bed it is gently, slowly; everything he does is gentle, slow. He kisses every one of her scars like he is saying penance for putting them there. Afterwards he twists ringlets of her hair around his fingers and watches them unravel when he lets go. They go home three days later, together. He doesn't speak once on the way.

#

The first time he'd told her he loved her she'd had her shoes in one hand and dirt on her feet. His truck had broken down on the way to rehearsal for their tour, and it had been Rayna who had jumped out and started walking first. He'd run after her, asking her where she was going, and she'd told him as though it was obvious: 'To rehearsal. You just standin' around all day or are you gonna get your Willie Nelson on and join me?' It was high summer, the air oppressive and sticky, and a thin sheen of sweat had covered them both, turning her cheeks a shade of pink he hadn't been able to stop looking at. 'Good thing I've broken these boots in,' he'd said. She'd pulled off her shirt and looped it in his belt, grinning at him and untucking her white vest from her cut offs, and he'd stopped walking. It had taken her a moment to realise, and she'd turned back to him and tipped her head to one side in a question. 'What are you doing?' was what she'd meant, but all he said was 'I love you'. It was simple, and she didn't move for a second, just looked at him with his T-shirt clinging to his chest and his hands by his sides. And then she'd been before him in one movement, and she'd told him she loved him too, and luckily for them there had been a field at the side of the road he'd been able to pull her into because he would have done so regardless, and a gravely lay-by would have been far more uncomfortable. They were late for rehearsal, and the rest of the band had pretended not to notice the grass in their hair and the smiles on their faces. Deacon had spent the entire day telling anyone in the vicinity while he looked straight at her that he loved the song they were singing, he loved her hair like that, he loved the new amps, and she'd felt somersaults in her stomach and tingling in her lips every time and been unable to look away from him. They were the only fools if they'd thought they were fooling anyone. He tells her he loves her, all these days and years and broken hearts later, he tells her, and it sounds as sweet to her ears now as it did that day.

#

They clink their glasses together with a little too much enthusiasm, sloshing tequila onto the Formica tabletop. 'I can't believe we just did that,' Juliette squeaks as she wipes her hand on her jeans. Rayna grins. 'I can.' What they'd done was back their boss into a corner. He'd scoffed at them when they'd walked into his office, all heels and hair, but Marshall Evans had learned quickly that one Country Queen is dangerous, two will turn your balls into rhinestone belts. 'What were you gonna do if he'd actually let us quit?' Juliette asks. 'Scratch his car with my keys on the way out.' Rayna crosses her legs under the table. The band on the rickety stage start up a new song, cheers breaking out across the little crowd gathered on the dancefloor. 'To Deacon being back in our bands,' Juliette says, lifting her glass. 'My band,' Rayna corrects, doing the same. 'Whatever.' She mutters it, tossing blonde hair over her shoulder, and Rayna laughs loudly. 'To Marshall Evans' tiny dick.' They clink again and down their shots, feet tapping in time with the music.

#

When they were kids, wispy teenagers with reckless souls they try to pretend are tamed now, Sarah Claybourne was never to be found without a pack of filter papers in her pocket and spare underwear in her bag. Some would have said she was a bad influence, except that Rayna was indulging in her fair share of recklessness of her own. Aunt Eileen muttered under her breath at dinner tables Rayna didn't want to be at, Tandy tried to talk sense - come home, maybe the guy with the guitar isn't good for you, are you sure music is what you should be doing? - her manager worried she'd go off the rails, but forgot in the midst of counting all the money she was making him. Sarah had cranked up the stereo in her car and sang along out of tune, top down all the way to the lakes. They'd sit on the shore, Rayna on her belly with a pen cap in her mouth, lost in rhythms and words she spun like plates until they fell into place, Deacon with his guitar pulling melodies from her like he could hear inside her mind. Sarah would lean on a rock blowing smoke rings into the air, Vince at her side. Hours would pass and the sun would fall, the old blankets she kept in the trunk pulled around shoulders and firewood lit. it was Vince who'd suggested they go for a swim the summer night Rayna and Deacon had scored their first number one. They were celebrating in style, gas station wine and paper party hats with little straps that hurt when they pinged. 'You just wanna see my ass,' Deacon quipped, tossing his clothes to the ground and tugging playfully at the hem of Rayna's sweater. 'Claybourne I've seen your crack more times than I've seen your face,' Vince replied, and his laughter was as loud as the splash he'd made as he jumped in. The water was cold, still, four lopsided party hats bobbing up and down on the surface, their song blaring from the car stereo on repeat.

'My brother is a masochist,' Sarah declares, the Bug protesting on the bumpy road out to the lake. 'He doesn't let things go,' she turns her head to look at Rayna pointedly, her earrings as big as wind chimes, 'clearly.' Rayna leans back on the headrest, too relaxed to be in a car with someone who scratches bumpers without fail when she parallel parks. 'Do you think I should have told him?' she asks, almost lost in the noise from the engine but Sarah hears her, she always has. She thinks for a long moment. 'I think you did what you had to do.' From her Rayna knows it's the truth. 'I know what Deacon was, I saw what you became. No one should put that on a child.' She lets go of the wheel, a forefinger all that steers it, and rubs Rayna's knee. 'He'll work through his shit, I know you know that, somewhere in there.' A smile spreads across her face, small and slow. 'And I have a niece I want to take shopping.'

#

Maddie doesn't know if she wants to see Deacon. She knows that whatever happened between him and her mom is complicated, too grown-up for her to know the whole truth, but she's read the newspapers. Since the accident every single one of them that's mentioned her parents - her actual parents, the ones she shares blood cells with - has commented on Deacon's drinking. And there have been a lot, the press just can't get enough of the ill-fated love story between Rayna Jaymes and the man that hasn't left her side in twenty five years. Her father, a drunk. She knows that hasn't been the case for a long time, she and Daphne have grown up around Deacon, something she now understands for what it's really been, a way for Rayna to keep them close to each other, to let them know each other. She reads everything she can find about their love affair, fascinated almost despite herself - how they'd rarely talked publicly about their feelings for each other, but written song after song that laid it all bare, something the press and the public lapped up from the very beginning. She finds photographs of them, of her mother at barely twenty years old looking up at Deacon the way Maddie has never seen her look at Teddy, of Deacon looking back at her like he must have been trying not to do in all the years since. How his friend had died, how he'd developed a problem, how bad that problem had gotten, how he'd gone to rehab. Five times, she reads on one website. Five times in rehab. She reads about the whole sordid history, what of it is public anyway, and sees more pictures - him with black eyes, her mother in dark sunglasses with her head down. She is angry at Deacon. And then her mother had married Teddy Conrad, and Deacon Claybourne had been heartbroken ever since. But no one had ever truly believed she'd stayed faithful to her husband while she'd kept Deacon so close, no one believed the looks and the touches during their shows, in moments they were caught off guard by sneaky cameras, didn't belie their continued romance. No one believed they'd managed to stay away from each other for fourteen solid years.

Maddie doesn't know what she believes. So she asks Rayna. She expects a summing up of carefully chosen parts, but Rayna tells her the truth. A PG version, sure, but the truth. She doesn't paint Deacon as a villain in the story, far from it, she paints him as someone who just couldn't cope. She tells Maddie about moments from their lives together, silly, happy moments, full of the reasons she's loved him all this time. Maddie can't blame her mother for her decision - she's grown up in a healthy, loving household, with a father who has doted on her and her sister completely, who's treated her mother well. She can't blame Deacon either though. She asks the killer question. Rayna can't look her in the eye when she tries to construct an answer as to whether he was drinking the night of the crash. 'I want to see him,' Maddie says. 'I want to ask him myself.' It is a long time before Rayna speaks. 'Okay,' is what she says finally.

#

He goes back to see Bertha. He hasn't slept properly in a few days, not since he and Rayna got back from the cabin and she went home to her daughters. His confusion comes from a gnawing in the pit of his stomach that is becoming increasingly hard to ignore, something that tells him that he is blinding himself to what he needs to see, that playing happy families isn't the way this goes. He'd spent three precious days wrapped around Rayna, the rest of the world and all their problems a million miles away, but now that he's back in town, harsh reality is rearing its ugly head, telling him he can't run any longer, that his problems, their problems, are lurking around every corner, waiting for him to look them in the face. He wants to go back to the peace and quiet, inside and outside his head, wants Rayna warm and soft beside him. Bertha slaps his arm bashfully when she sees the flowers he's brought her, and she pinches one of his cheeks and gets him coffee, like she did every day when he was too far gone to notice how much she looked like his mother, back in the days when she would song Dolly Parton songs in the kitchen up to her elbows in flour. 'Been a long time since my husband's bought me flowers,' she tells him with a twinkle in her eye, 'they stop trying after a few years.' She arranges them in water, and looks at Deacon where he leans against the wall holding his cup in both hands. 'Well,' she amends, 'some of them do. The ones that don't are a rare kind.' He looks away, down at the floor. 'Maybe that kind are fools, Bertha.' Bertha laughs with the amusement of someone who has seen a lot of life and knows better. 'Love makes us all fools honey, you've just been dealt a whole lot more love than most. Doesn't make you a whole lot more of a fool.' 'I don't know,' he says, 'I sure feel like one.' The laughter fades from Bertha's lined face and she puts a hand on one generous hip. 'You didn't lose her,' she tells him, and it is with the same voice his mother would use to tell him homework wasn't going to do itself now was it? 'You came real close, but you didn't. Whatever it was made you sit in that chair and not touch her all that time, I don't know. But she's out there now, more than likely wishin' you'd pull yourself together and just love her like you're good at.' He knows she's right, that deep down that is what matters, the only thing that matters, that he loves Rayna, that he is a nothing but a shell without her. He knows that the love he has for her is so vast it can withstand anything, but he also knows the pain. The pain is as familiar to him as the love; he has lived with it inside his chest for so long it is like an old friend. An old friend that he really wishes would fuck off and leave him to be happy.

#

He isn't so gentle the next time, and neither is she. They've been arguing about which should come first, the acoustic or the big number, and he gets so close to her she can feel his breath on her face. Something in both of them snaps and it matters nothing what the words coming out of their mouths are, they're not arguing about the songs anymore. They're arguing about it all - she betrayed him, he ripped her life to pieces, she wanted him to want her all these years, he nearly fucking killed her, why would the big number come before the damn acoustic? And then something changes. They run out of verbal steam and he's looming over her and she's got her hands on her hips and they're both spitting feathers and breathing too heavily. Bucky sees the way he's looking at her and he is no idiot, he knows to get out of the way; the band feel the crackle in the room and don't bother to pack up their instruments. It's three seconds after the door shuts behind them that he slams her against the wall. They make it to a dark corner at least before the passion and the fire in their bellies takes over, and they're _pissed_ at each other, angry for it all and angry at everything they don't know how to say and everything that got them there and God it feels so good to let it out. She leaves red raw scratch marks down his back beneath the flannel she only manages to rip open and not get off and he bites her lip so hard they both taste the blood. Her legs tremble like a cartoon jelly afterwards, all the way through the acoustic they do before the big number.


	6. Chapter 6

Her nails are painted the colour of the wine she swills around her glass. The glass is handcut, expensive; it feels fragile beneath her fingers, like her grip could shatter it without her even trying. She holds it carefully, lifts it to her lips and feels the gentle burn as the liquid slips down her throat. She feels a pleasant numbness spread through her stomach and out to her fingertips, and she understands, for a moment, how Deacon sought this out, this feeling of release, of blindness from everything that hurts. But it is temporary - morning will come, and with it the unforgiving knowledge that nothing vanishes because you close your eyes. She has to let Deacon figure things out at his own pace, no matter how much it rips her apart to wait, wonder, ask herself over and over if they can possibly make it through this. They could shatter, she knows it, dreads it. Waits for it. She pours another glass.

#

Teddy has always slept on her side of the bed when she's been out on tour. He started doing it not long after they were married, when she'd gone on the road just after Maddie's first birthday. Deacon had been a few months out of rehab and she'd been doing the 'space' thing for as long as she could bear, and Teddy had known she'd been struggling with that, even though it was his ring she wore and his kiss that greeted her good morning. She hadn't quite looked him in the eye when she'd told him she was hiring Deacon again, that her music was suffering without him and that she wanted to put everything into the tour. What she'd meant, Teddy had feared, was that _she_ was suffering without Deacon. They were happy, Teddy and Rayna, their respect for and trust in one another burgeoning in a way that made him feel warm right down to his toes, and it had never been an option for him to say no, he would give her anything she wanted, anything that would make her happy. That was all he wanted in the whole world, to cocoon the three of them in the lovely life they were building for their little family. He knew Rayna was trying her best to fight whatever she still felt for Deacon, that the pull she couldn't help but feel was something that made her the opposite of happy. So he'd baked chocolate brownies the way she liked them best on their last night together before the shiny tour bus had arrived with daylight and whisked her away from him, had gone so far as to help her pack her bags. The first night hadn't been the hardest, even if he'd thought so as he'd struggled to fall asleep, staring up at the ceiling with the scent of her all around him. He'd climbed in on her side and had called her as soon as the clock on her bedside table had told him the show would be over, asking her how it had gone, telling her how much he missed her. His heart had ached as he'd listened to her voice on the other end, how excited she'd sounded, how alive. He'd slept, eventually, with his head on her pillow, and had done the same every night after until she'd come home.

He stills sleeps on the left side now. She's never shared this bed, the one in the his new apartment, has never so much as stepped foot in the cold master bedroom. It's a bachelor pad, he supposes, but he can't think of it that way - he doesn't want to be a bachelor. He'd thought for a while that he wanted Peggy, that they could have a life together, but she's four months pregnant now and he feels nothing but contempt when he thinks of her. He wonders how it came to this. He wonders if it's his child at all. He wonders how different things could have been, but even before he's finished the thought he knows the answer: there is no could have been - he and Rayna would never have ended up together, however he'd played his cards. She'd slept on the left because that was Deacon's side of the bed.

#

Deacon is funny. Not many people realise it, in recent years especially, thinking of him instead as the guy with the sad songs who spends his days yearning for Rayna Jaymes. Back in the day they thought of him as the guy who had gone off the rails, fights and jail spells, drunken slurring at paparazzi who had no problem catching him in a state - he _was_ a state. What they've missed, what they've all missed, is the razor-sharp wit that tumbles from his mouth at the least expected moments that are all the funnier because he is The Brooding Guy and The Messed Up Guy and not The Funny Guy. His humour is high on the list of reasons Rayna has loved him all these years. Back when they were grasshoppers with nothing but balls and big dreams, she'd thought him possibly the most arrogant person she'd ever met. It was either the way he chewed his lip when he was nervous or the way he made her laugh so hard her ribs hurt - or maybe, though she would never admit it, the way his T-shirts clung to the muscles of his chest - that wore her down, even if she did realise soon after that she'd been a done deal the day he'd walked into her life. He makes her laugh when they're both in a silly mood, sat cross-legged on her tour bus, him strumming a guitar and her singing anything that comes out of her mouth that rhymes with 'butt'. He makes her laugh when he sees her trying to fend off boring suit men at an aftershow, when he recognises that she's trying to keep from yawning and recreates Suit No.1's dodgy toupee with a well-placed napkin, shooting her a wicked smile. He makes her laugh when she's in tears with her head on his lap, racked with guilt at leaving her girls at home while they clock up so many miles she doesn't know which city they're in anymore, when he tells her to look on the plus side, at least they don't have to eat her cooking for a few months.

He still surprises her when he cracks a funny she doesn't see coming. She should know by now when to expect them, should be able to predict where his thoughts are going. But Deacon has never been predictable, not even to her. He hasn't had much to joke about lately, and she'd give anything to feel the abandon of laughing at him so hard tears roll down her cheeks.

#

She looks like their mama. Tandy swallows hard, knotting her fingers in the kid's duffle coat on her lap. It's like stepping back in time, watching her laugh at she pushes Daphne on the swing. Same park - same rusty old swings, probably - same trees that shed onto the slide beneath them and give you leaf-wedgies. To the untrained eye Rayna looks happy, to passers-by, other parents, the older kids who still want to play in the sandpit even though their legs are too long and their must-have shoes will end up ruined. They no doubt think she's spending a breezy Sunday afternoon with her daughter without much of a care in the world. Tandy's eye knows different. She knows the smile on Rayna's face doesn't quite reach her eyes, knows the laughter that comes from her mouth when Daphne swings too high and loses a shoe to the gravel below is real but far from carefree. She remembers seeing the same look on their mother's face, seeing her push a tiny squealing Rayna up into the air and in the moment before gravity did its work, watching her façade slip, the shadows claim her for their own. It's uncanny, how much Rayna looks like her. The curls that bounce down her back, the hands that tickle Daphne's knees when she whooshes back to earth, that hold her cold cheeks while she presses a kiss to her nose and lets her go again. She cuts quite a figure in the playground of women in sensible autumn coats with manageable hairstyles. Rayna stands tall and lithe, golden hair catching the light every time she moves. Tandy sighs. Damn guitar players. She knows something is going on that Rayna doesn't want to talk about. And she knows the something is Deacon Claybourne.

#

He never uses his plus ones. He never has - in the beginning Rayna was the only one he wanted on his arm and she had her own plus one, she didn't need his. She'd give hers to her sister, friends, the dates that would hang off her in the days before she'd given in to Deacon's puppy dog eyes, the dates she used as a ruse to keep him at arm's length, not that it had worked. He'd hated every one of them, would stare daggers at them all night hoping he looked threatening enough for them to back off and leave her to realise it was him that she wanted. He would watch them try to make her laugh, try to make her listen to whatever stupid things they thought would be interesting to her, and he'd scoff at them, until he'd see them inevitably make a move on her, and then he'd sulk. In the early days he'd stop himself from doing anything, would find himself some girl to hook up with to take his mind off the confusing things he was feeling. And then came the day he couldn't help himself. Edgehill had thrown a Halloween party, and Rayna had come as Little Red Riding Hood, in a dress so short Deacon had almost choked on his tongue when she'd walked in. Her plus one had been trailing behind her, some guy whose eyes were fixed on her hemline, but she'd ignored him most of the night in favour of having fun with her bandmates, much to Deacon's joy. She'd grinned at him while she'd told him she liked his costume, plucking at the buttons on his Sheriff shirt playfully, and he'd waggled his eyebrows at her and told her he'd show her his badge later, earning himself a slap on the arm. They'd been drinking from the same cup, Deacon leaning back on one of the plush couches with his arm all but around her, when her date had wandered over to find her. She must have realised she was getting far too close to Dangerous Territory and had let the guy steer her away from his competition. When Deacon had seen him later all over her in a corner, he'd lost it. The idiot was lucky the fistful of shirt he'd used to wrench him off Rayna wasn't a fistful of his chest hair, and he'd told him so while he'd snarled at him to get his hands off her and get out. Rayna had stared at Deacon in disbelief, not caring at all that Chad or Brad or Bryan with a 'y' had bolted - thank God the boring bastard wasn't still slobbering all over her - but she'd been stone cold furious all the same. She'd also been secretly pleased and very turned on by his jealousy, but the intensity of his obsession with her even then should have scared her, and didn't, only because she was equally fixated on him. 'What the hell do you think you're doing?' she'd asked incredulously. 'He wasn't showing you enough respect, Ray, you deserve more than that.' 'Right,' she'd said, laughing bitterly and trying not to look at the way his anger made his stubble-peppered jaw look even more chiselled. 'So that girl whose throat you had your tongue down earlier, the one with the Barbie boobs, what was her name Deacon?' He'd looked down at his feet, sheepish, and she hadn't spoken to him for a week, which had been kind of difficult given that they'd had a run of six shows in five days to play. Every time he'd gone anywhere near her during that week she'd gotten butterflies in her stomach so badly she thought she might throw up. It had been a couple of weeks after she'd grudgingly forgiven him that he'd kissed her for the first time.

In the years he and Rayna were together neither of them used their plus ones. He would step back while she did the schmoozing that came with being a hit, the journalists and the industry execs, producers that wanted her name next to theirs. He'd catch her eye across the room while she smiled on cue and thanked them for their praise, and would disarm her with nothing more than a look, delighted that he could have such an effect on her. At the point of the night that was late enough not to be rude and early enough not to be polite, he'd shuffle up beside her and give her the hungry look she knew so well, the one that started at her eyes and trailed down her body, lingering at her cleavage and dipping back up again, his intentions more than clear. He'd lean in and whisper in her ear what he wanted to do to her, smirking when he felt her shiver. That was his cue to take her hand and tug her towards the door, not that she ever needed a lot of tugging - she hated the parties almost as much as he did, was just as impatient to escape the falseness of it all and get him alone. By the time anyone realised they were gone, he'd have half her clothes on the floor and her ability to form sentences left somewhere between the hotel lobby and the elevator up to whichever of their rooms they could get to quickest. He would revel in having her all to himself - sharing her wasn't his thing, he didn't care who with. In those moments, the door locked behind them and the rest of the world a vague memory to both of them, she was his, only his, his name the only one on her lips, his hands the only hands allowed to touch her.

He doesn't use his plus ones now because he doesn't even go to the parties. His name stays uncrossed on the guest lists, his phone unanswered when Bucky calls to see where he is. Rayna never calls to see where he is. She already knows - at his house, sitting in silence, replaying all the moments of the last twenty five years that have led them to this point. The occasional person asks about him, those who don't know to steer clear of such personal questions, and she does what she always does - puts on her best smile, gathers all she can of the composure she's perfected over the years, and tells them Deacon just isn't a fan of salmon canapés. But it doesn't matter whether he's on the other side of the champagne table making eyes at her or whether he's in the room at all, he still distracts her, and she politely excuses herself from everyone who mentions his name. She spends a lot of time in bathrooms at the parties her label throw now.

#

'So, you and my sister huh,' Rayna says, smiling at Bucky as he blushes and looks away from her. 'Is that, I mean, are you okay with that Ray?' She grins. 'You're two of my favourite people, so yeah, Buck, of course I'm okay with that.' The relief on his face sends a little rush of fondness through her and she squeezes his arm. 'So is it gonna be a church wedding or…?' She doesn't often see Bucky's Panic Face, but there it is. She chuckles. 'You know,' she says, serious for a moment, 'Tandy's had a rough time of it, her ex-husband is an idiot - was then, still is, though it's hard to tell seeing as how he's about six states away with his secretary and their twelve kids.' Bucky nods, remembering the late night phonecalls Rayna had had from Tandy a few years back, the weeks she'd come on the road with her to get away from her wreck of a life. 'Is that your way of warning me to be good to your sister?' he asks. 'Damn right, and if you're not I'll have a cowboy boot up your ass before you can say yeehaw, Bucky Dawes.' She slides her arm across his shoulders, side-hugs him while he looks bashfully at his hands. 'I know my schedule hasn't exactly allowed you much time for dating over these past years Buck, and Lord knows you've been caught up in the middle of far too many of my relationship dramas. It's about time you had some happiness.' He smiles at her, accepting her blessing and watching as she tries to hide the brief sadness that flickers over her face, the same one he sees whenever he knows thoughts of Deacon plague her unexpectedly. 'He'll come around Ray,' he tells her, and he believes it. Her answering smile is weak, but she tries. 'Maybe when he does we can double-date.' She picks up her bag and pulls him to his feet. 'But right now you and I have a show to get ready for, and I don't think that new suit you're wearin' is for my benefit, so you better go buy my sister some flowers or somethin' or I might put sprouts on your plate at thanksgiving.' They link arms as they walk, and she leans her head on the shoulder of the man who's been the most solid person in her life for two decades.

#

He's in the depression phase. He doesn't talk much, does a lot of pensive staring, mostly at her. She isn't sure what he's thinking when he does - hurt and fury mixed with the desire he's never been able to tamper down around her, not even now, not even after everything. The combination is lethal, and hot as hell. His teeth marks on her neck and the fingertip bruises on her hips are proof of it, new scars that will fade, that remind her of nights neither of them sleep at all, mornings he wakes her with impatient hands on her skin. There are answering marks all over Deacon, fourteen years' worth of them, scratches in places he can't see that burn when he showers and make him long for her all over again. But still he can't talk to her, doesn't know what to say, what he wants her to say. He tried, a few days ago, but he got too upset and she cried and he did too, and that night there was no branding of skin, no whispered profanities, hissed proclamations; that night there were only tears as he unzipped and unbuttoned and unhooked every piece of clothing from her body until he could feel her against him and remind himself that she was real, that they were real.

She doesn't wear clothes when she sleeps in his bed. She barely wears clothes when she's in his house at all, but last night she'd pulled on one of his T-shirts and sat on his couch with him while he'd strummed absentminded chords, boxers all that covered his modesty. He hadn't quite got it off her again when he'd slid his hands under her and carried her as far as the hallway outside his bedroom, and the cotton had crumpled between them as he'd shoved it up and pressed her against the doorframe.

He sits on his porch in the dark, the T-shirt twisted in his hands.

#

Bucky and Glenn drink shots. They sit side by side and throw back one after the other, their suit jackets slung over the backs of their chairs. 'You got the good one,' Glenn grouses, 'Juliette is driving me crazy.' 'I thought she'd mellowed?' Bucky air quotes, a little haphazardly, and Glenn scoffs. 'That girl doesn't know the meaning of the word "mellow". She's still every inch the diva.' 'Believe me,' Bucky sighs, 'Rayna is no less trouble. At least your diva doesn't have a Deacon.' Glenn exhales and nods, giving him that one. 'There is that. I think I'd rather the endless string of guys than a Deacon. At least Juliette loses interest in them before they can cause much real damage.' They order another round, and the guy behind the bar eyes them as he wipes down the countertop. 'Rough day at the office gentlemen?' Bucky is the first to laugh. 'If only,' he says, and Glenn lifts his glass. 'I'll drink to that,' he agrees, right as his phone issues a shrill ring, insistent that he pay attention. He fishes it out of his pocket and drops his head back in despair when Juliette's number flashes up on the screen. 'Think now's a good time to break it to her that her and Rayna are about to be spendin' a whole lot more time together?' he asks. Bucky lets out a long sigh. 'I don't know how many arena shows their truce can last through, but we're about to find out Glenn. Tell Juliette I said hi.' He slaps a couple of notes on the bar and hops unsteadily down from his stool. 'We're back in business.'

#

Coleman's family had lived across the street from the Wyatts when Rayna and Tandy were children. Their parents had been brunch-on-Saturdays, late-night-bourbon-in-the-study kind of buddies. Coleman was Tandy's age, his brother a couple of years older, and the four of them had quickly forged a penchant for lemonade stands and bike rides down to the river. Coleman and Rayna had a mutual love of Shakespeare - the comedies, not the tragedies - and they'd talked at length while they swung their legs from the high branches in the trees their parents definitely wouldn't be happy about them climbing. Tandy had taught both brothers how to treat the girlfriends they worked their way through, saving them from more than one dumping, and when she'd been hiding her less than impressive Biology grades from her parents, the Carlisles had searched their garden for unfortunate frogs that hadn't made it through the cold winter and shown her how to dissect like a pro. They'd all looked after Rayna, the baby of the group, much to her chagrin, forbidding her from swinging across the river on the tyre rope and striking more fear into the heart of her first boyfriend than even Lamar could have hoped to achieve. She'd imparted her own contributions, her uncanny flair for picking locks and charming strangers into doing whatever she wanted surprising Tandy, who for the most part was a model child, with the exception of a few misdemeanours that she was an expert at lying about. She'd make a great politician, Coleman had told her once on a bike ride along the canal path, and she'd refused to speak to him all the way home.

The first time Coleman met Deacon Claybourne he'd smelled danger straight away. Not from Deacon himself, he seemed like a good guy, a little cocky maybe but he could tell that was the false bravado of someone young and green, fierce in their determination to make it. They'd been in a bar where every other person was armed with a musical instrument or a laminated drinks menu. Rayna had been talking to her manager, making circles with her arms and nodding her head animatedly. Coleman had grinned at her when she'd spotted him across the room. He'd been listening to her sing since she was a little girl, had often heard her and her mother harmonising in their garden. Her first real gig - he was as proud as a big brother. 'You're early!' she'd said, excusing herself and rushing over to him, squeaking a little as he'd engulfed her in a bear hug that lifted her clean off her feet. 'We don't go on 'til ten. You after a spot in my band Cole?' 'I play a mean tambourine Rayna, you don't know what you're missing not hiring me.' She'd laughed at him, the open, unrestrained kind he'd missed hearing in the few years since her mother had died. He'd noticed it slowly come back when she'd started playing music on her own, when he'd walked into their house one day to see her tucked on a couch scribbling words furiously, scraps of paper scattered around her like fallen confetti. He'd set her back on the floor that night in the bar and wondered what it was about her that had been different, something in the cadence of her voice, like the chains that had been dragging her down had been lifted a little, like she was no longer drowning. 'Come meet my guitar player,' she'd said, and Coleman had followed her towards an unkempt man - who really was barely more than a boy, he'd realised when he got closer - sat at one of the Formica tables. He'd looked up at Rayna and for just a moment Coleman had seen his eyes fix on her, a ghost of a smile that was meant only for her flash across his face. She'd introduced them and Deacon had gripped Coleman's hand with the calloused fingers of a musician, shaking it earnestly. Coleman had sat up front for their set, watching curiously. They hadn't taken their eyes off each other, much to the interest of the captivated audience, but Coleman saw something more than the chemistry that dripped from them, the fissures of electricity ringing alarm bells in his ears. 'Be careful there,' he'd said to Rayna afterwards, after he'd congratulated her, lifted drink after drink in her honour, and she'd looked at him so innocently he'd felt a renewed need to protect her. 'He's just a friend Cole,' she'd sworn, and he'd nodded, looking over at Deacon. 'You'd be best to keep it that way.'

#

The new record is finished, polished and ready for take off. Liam can't quite help himself though, and he finds reasons with varying degrees of credibility to see Rayna. The latest is the font he wants his name credited in on the album sleeve, and she doesn't even try to hide her eye roll when he spouts that one. 'You know you could just say you want to spend time with me.' 'I do not,' he counters, flopping down on the chair in Bucky's office. 'I'm not gonna hang around you pouting about my missed chance, I'm no Deacon Claybourne.' He realises what he's said when it's too late, and he screws up his face when he sees hers fall. 'I'm sorry,' he says, but she turns away from him. 'I'm pretty sure Deacon's done with his days of hanging around me.' Liam can't help it, he laughs. 'Please tell me you realise that's bullshit. Rayna, he's not going to stop pining for you just like that, even with all the stuff that's come out in the wash lately - it's been twenty odd years. You're a hard woman to get over. Believe me.' She holds his gaze and he seems, just for a moment, uncomfortable. Liam doesn't do embarrassed, so that can't be what she's seeing on his face, but it sure as hell looks like it and she nudges him in the arm playfully, trying to lighten the tension that has settled over them. 'I highly doubt _you_ have trouble getting over anyone.' She expects him to crack a smile, to give her that facetious look she's come to feel such affection for. He doesn't. He just keeps looking at her, and she feels suddenly awkward. 'You mean you didn't sleep with the hot maid in St Lucia? Cos I know you went on that holiday without me, and no way you didn't cash in on those dimples.' He mutters something about being a jilted groom going on his honeymoon alone, and she tries really hard to keep a straight face, but she can't, and to her relief he can't either. 'Don't tell me you've never at least pictured me naked,' he grins, and she puts her hand on her heart, Girl Guide style, and swears, 'Never. Not once.' He lets out a huff, feigning hurt. 'I look good, your loss if you choose not to find out. And let me tell you, I have big feet, and you know what they say.' 'Big shoes?' she shoots. 'Huge.' They choose Tahoma for the album font, and then change it to Comic Sans when they're three beers in at the bar down the street.

#

Lamar offers her orange juice. 'How is Maddie coping with everything?' he asks, and Rayna smiles at him, touched that he cares, but then he's never had a problem caring for her daughters, they've always been able to melt his ice queen heart. 'She's coping okay. I don't know if it's fully hit her yet, and she's struggling to work out how she sees Deacon and Teddy, but she's being really mature about it all.' It's true - there have been tears, a whole lot of tears, and the occasional screaming fight, during which Rayna lets Maddie get her anger and her fear out and tries her best not to be hurt by the scathing remarks she makes and later apologises for. What Rayna doesn't tell Lamar is that her daughter isn't doing so well with the thought of her father being an addict. For the most part she has been amazing in her willingness to understand the situation, to ask Rayna to piece the story together. She had thought she was ready to see Deacon, but Rayna knows she is hesitant. She also knows that Deacon isn't ready, and it worries her that Maddie will start to question why.

'Do you think it's better that she knows?' Lamar asks, setting his glass of juice on the table, untouched. He doesn't meet Rayna's eye, and she peers at him for a moment before she speaks. 'I don't know daddy, but I think so, yes. She deserved to know the truth. They both did.' When she gets into her car later she sees him in her rearview mirror, standing by the window of his study, watching her leave.

#

There had been a night Deacon had almost lost it with Rayna. She'd been married a few years, pregnant twice, and they'd built a solid relationship based on friendship and denial. He'd managed to put a lid on his demons, barely contained though they may be, enough to be around her, be in her band. But the night in Atlanta under bright lights and the watchful eyes of screaming fans, he'd come close to really screwing it up. Teddy had been to see her the day before, had turned up at the arena in the middle of their rehearsal as a surprise, their two small daughters back in Nashville with Rayna's sister so they could 'have some alone time', as he had put it. Deacon had nearly punched him when he'd heard that, had ragged the mic back into its stand with a little too much force and walked away a little too quickly. She hadn't been in her dressing room after the show, hadn't been in the midst of the people milling around the hotel bar, and Deacon hadn't slept a wink, seething at the thought of her with him, what they would surely be doing after not having seen each other for weeks. He couldn't stand the thought of Teddy's hands on her, so much so that he'd grabbed his key card and stormed down the corridor and up to the penthouse floor in the elevator before he'd gotten a grip and turned back. He'd spent the rest of the night imagining how good his fist would feel against Teddy's jaw and playing out with excruciating clarity his and Rayna's most risqué encounters, the kind he was absolutely sure she wasn't having with Mr Pinstripe. He could almost feel her beneath him, her hot breath in his ear, until he'd opened his eyes and his fever had been replaced with an irrational disappointment at finding himself alone, and then he'd taken to pacing the room instead. He'd managed, while Teddy had stood at the side of the stage earlier that day with his eyes trained on his wife, not to antagonise the situation, to play their songs without making things difficult for her. The next night had been different. Teddy was long gone, and Deacon should have been happy about it, but all he felt was a gnawing, desperate want in his bones. Rayna had tipped her head up at him in the middle of a song, gifted him with her megawatt smile until she'd seen the look on his face, and as her smile had fallen he'd reached out and grabbed for her, catching her tightly and pulling her against him. He'd growled out his next line of the song and she'd missed hers, but he'd covered for her with an impromptu riff, had stepped closer to her when she'd stepped back, not letting her get away. He'd needed to let her know she was his, needed to let himself know, and she'd tried to resist but she hadn't stopped him - she knew what he needed. She needed it too. She'd gathered a fistful of his shirt and he'd grazed the belt of her jeans with his fingers, too deliberately, right there in front of anyone who cared to see. He'd never wanted to kiss her as much as he had in that moment, hadn't ever felt so on fire with the need for her, but at the last second before he'd done something really stupid she'd pushed him back, her hand on his chest a warning to them both.

Deacon wonders how different things could have been, if only he'd had the self control with alcohol that he's never had with Rayna; if he could have resisted it, maybe he wouldn't have had to work so hard for so long to resist her. Maybe they would never have found themselves here. But he knows - he and Rayna will always end up together.

#

He brushes the hair back from her face when he thinks she's asleep, and whispers in almost nothing more than a breath that he loves her. He hasn't been able to say it to her face lately, too many feelings leaving him confused and scared he'll never be able to get over her lie. When she wakes in his bed early one morning to find him gone, she sits up, wide awake in an instant and fearful, until she sees the little sachet of sugar on the pillow next to her. When they used to stay in grimy motels while they were on the road, if one of them woke before the other and needed to get some air, take a walk to the nearest badly-stocked store to forage some breakfast for them both, they would leave a sugar sachet in place of a note. The motels were no bellhop-and-penthouse affair, and it was rare they had notepaper or a pen, but they always had the little free sugars next to the crappy instant coffee. Rayna clutches the packet in her hand, pulling her knees up to her chest and focusing on the hope the familiar gesture gives her, knowing its presence is meant to tell her not to give up, on him, on them.

Deacon knocks on the door of the worn little house. Fishing rods are propped against the wall, a rickety wooden bench under the window. A man's face appears in the crack of the door, and surprise brightens his sallow skin for a moment when he recognises his visitor. '3B,' he says, pulling the door open wide enough for Deacon to take in the paint-splattered overalls hanging off his thin frame, the mop of grey hair that looks like it hasn't been cut since he was in the room next to Deacon's at St Mary's rehab facility. 'Been a while Charlie,' he replies, and he can't help but break into a grin and return the embrace the man gives him. 'How've you been man?' Charlie asks when they're sitting side by side on the bench with cups of steaming herbal tea. 'What is this crap?' he asks instead of answering, pulling a face. 'It's peppermint, you big wuss. This is what I do now.' Charlie gestures to a garden at the side of the house that Deacon hadn't noticed on his way up the crooked path. 'I grow herbs. You know, instead of drinking myself half to death. My insides are like a daily colonic.' He sips from his cup. 'Tastes like shit though.' Deacon nods in agreement. 'So, you still a lovesick idiot for that girl? I read the papers, you were almost a goner on us by all accounts. Her too. Looked pretty brutal, 3B.' Deacon blows on his drink. 'It was.' 'That why you're here?' he asks, and Deacon nods. He remembers what he was like in his drinking days, but he needs to hear from someone else just how bad he was, someone who's seen his ugliest sides. He looks at Charlie, at the lines that criss-cross his hollow face. The night he'd gotten the call to break it to him that Rayna had married the asshole she'd started dating, they'd been in the middle of a game of Blackjack, Deacon joking that they should book themselves into a retirement home when they got out and Charlie quipping back that it was a bad idea - the old women probably drank more than both of them. When the porter had come to tell Deacon he had a message to call a Tandy Hampton, he'd bolted out of his chair so fast he'd knocked his hand to the floor, and when he'd heard her voice on the other end he'd asked breathlessly if something was wrong with Rayna before he even said hello. Tandy had paused for a moment before she'd answered him. Nothing was wrong, she'd said, and then gone on to deliver the blow. He would never in all his life forget the way it felt, like someone had kicked him in the stomach with razorblades. Bile had risen sharply in his throat and for a moment he'd thought he might pass out. And then wrath had taken over. Tandy's voice was still calling his name through the receiver that dangled limply from its cord when Deacon was halfway out the door. Charlie had intercepted him in the corridor and had paid no attention to his gruff demands to be left alone. 'You look like you're out to do some damage 3B, what kind of a friend would I be if I didn't come along for the ride?' And so Deacon had found himself kicking down the door of Rayna's apartment with Charlie by his side. He'd tried to hold Deacon back when he'd hit Teddy the first time. By the third time he'd grasped Rayna's arms instead to pull her as gently as he could away from the flying fists, apologising as he did so. She'd looked at him through a blur of tears in sheer confusion, never having seen him before, and he'd instantly regretted letting Deacon even think about driving over there like a crazed man. Charlie was a drunk himself, he dabbled in the occasional line of coke and he sure as hell popped the odd pill, but Deacon's rage that night shocked even him. He aimed it physically at Teddy and verbally at Rayna, vicious in his choice of words, and Charlie could hardly bear to look at her heartbroken face as every one of them cut her right down to the bone. He'd told Deacon later that he could see why he was holding such a torch for this girl, that she must be like fine bourbon going down, and that if he didn't get a fucking grip there wasn't a hope in all the world that he'd ever so much as see her again. The court case Teddy had filed had pretty much inked that, but it had been dropped a few days later without another word, and Deacon had known Rayna had stepped in and saved his skin yet again. Charlie had been dragged back to the facility with him that night, the both of them unceremoniously thrown into the isolation unit still in the cold police handcuffs, blood dried into Deacon's knuckles that belonged to both him and Teddy. He was too far gone to know exactly what he'd done.

He needs to know now, he says. Charlie huffs out a long breath. 'You were fucked up, brother. You split half the guy's face open - I heard the cops talking about how many stitches he was gonna need. Lucky you got those knocks in after he married her or that would have been some shitty wedding album.' He leans back. 'You tried to kiss her.' Deacon's head snaps up. He doesn't remember that at all. 'You were a little rough with her, it wasn't pretty. She was having none of it though. Slapped you clean across the face and then the square guy knocked you into a wall and called the cops.' In all the fights they'd had, and they'd had some ferocious ones, she'd only ever been scared he'd hurt himself. He'd never given her cause to fear him, would never have dreamed of it, no matter how out of it he'd been. The mortification that floods through his veins at the mere thought of how she must have felt is potent, makes him squeeze his eyes shut while the shame washes horribly over him. 'What did I do to her?' he manages to get out. Charlie knows he needs to hear it, however much it hurts, and he speaks quietly, honestly. 'You were smashin' up everything you got your hands on, there was no stoppin' you.' He lifts up the wife beater under his overalls, the faint scar still there under his ribs. 'Got a decent jab in with that vase you threw against the wall. She was cryin', beggin' you to stop. And then I don't know what did it but you did stop, and you went over to her and lifted her hand up and got a good look at the rock he'd put on her finger. You were scary, Jesus even I was ready for clearin' at that point.' 'I'm sorry Charlie, shit,' Deacon says. Charlie waves a bony hand in the air. 'Not me needs to hear it. You didn't like seeing someone else's ring on her, that is for damn sure. You started saying somethin' about how she was yours, how it should have been you, and she was tryin' her best to calm you down but then you got her face in your hands and that girl, she was terrified. She went real still, just looked at you, and that was when you lunged in and tried to plant a kiss on her. I was surprised she didn't pass out from the fumes on your breath.' He shook his head, lost in the memory. 'Anyway that's when it all went from bad to _really_ fucking bad.' They sat in silence a while, Charlie draining his cup, Deacon too sick to be able to lift his to his lips. 'It true you fell off the wagon?' Charlie asks eventually, carefully. Deacon doesn't answer - he doesn't need to. He picks his four month chip out of his pocket. 'She was pregnant,' he says, turning it over in his fingers while he looks out across the fields that surround Charlie's house, that hide the outside world and all its temptations from him and make him try to forget. 'With my baby. I have a fourteen year old daughter.' Charlie whistles long and low, and it's with a pat on the back that's just a little too hard that he says, 'You got a second chance, man.' Deacon turns to him, surprised. 'You see any nippers runnin' round my porch? You see a good woman cookin' me a meatloaf in her underwear? No you do not, old man. You have a family, Deac. A family with a woman who I'd bet the Jack I'm gonna drink on my death bed is still as hung up on you as you are on her. Sounds to me like you got everything you've ever wanted. So what the hell are you torturing yourself for?' He stands, puts his cup on the ground. 'Get off my porch and get your ass back to her, would you?'

He takes the long route home, drives the dusty road in silence. He is thinking, for most of the journey, of Maddie's face after she'd narrowly avoided landing herself with a concussion at Juliette's gig, of how scared she'd been. Of how she'd needed him. It's the first time he truly understands. It hadn't ever been Rayna's decision to make; the minute they'd created a child any choice they might have had to put their destructive feelings for each other first had been taken out of their hands. When he pulls up outside his house Rayna is sat on his loveseat, swinging back and forth with an absent look on her face and a blanket over her legs. She looks up at him but doesn't move, and he slides in beside her and takes her hand in his. 'I'd like to see Maddie,' he says, and she lets out a breath that sounds like four months worth of tension when she nods her consent. He feels an overwhelming lump in his throat and presses his lips to her temple. 'Ray,' he murmurs, closing his eyes. 'I love you.'

#

The tour is ready to start again. They haven't even left Nashville yet and it feels like a circus, Rayna thinks, as she sits on a concrete step in the rehearsal space parking lot and watches roadies load truck after truck, noise and colour and people everywhere. She is glad; of the distraction, of the anticipation - she can't wait to get back on stage, hear crowds call out her name, see excited faces. She's as nervous as she is excited to sing the new stuff she's been working on since the accident, get out some of the feelings that have been swirling around within her, maybe exorcise some of her demons. She plucks at a loose thread in her jeans. It had been hard to decide Deacon wouldn't be in her band. It was mutual, him feeling as much as she did that it would be more pressure than they could take at the moment, 'they' being the two of them, the 'they' they were finally bringing back to a happier place. The small gigs they've played in recent weeks have been equal parts healing and unbearable, all their love and all their pain more raw than ever. Sharing that kind of intimacy with a quiet audience, enough people to fill a few seats and prop up a bar, is one thing. Doing it with an arena of fans excited to have Rayna back in the game, to see the two of them back on a stage together, scrutinising every glance… that would be quite another. Deacon is coming on the tour though. It had been Juliette's idea, and in the midst of everything, they'd agreed. 'I think it could be a good solution,' she'd said, her call to Rayna to ask her permission to offer the job to Deacon both surprising and touching. It certainly could be. Having Deacon nearby, a temporary reprise from the difficulties that have threatened to wear them down, a break from the intensity. It might just be the perfect solution.

#

He asks for sprinkles on his ice cream. It's not very manly, he says, with something of a shy smile, but she knows he wants to make her laugh, to break some kind of ice. He's nervous. Maddie asks for sprinkles too. She figures both of them having little girly adornments on their cones can only help with the ice breaking, though she doesn't really known how you break ice with someone you've already known your whole life. 'So,' Deacon says, as they head towards the promenade. 'So,' she echoes, and neither of them know how to end the sentence, so she cuts to the chase. 'So you're my dad.' 'So I am.' Deacon turns his head to look at her hesitantly. 'You love my mom,' Maddie says, more a statement than a question, and Deacon tells her yes, he does. Her voice is timid when she speaks again. 'Do you love _me_?' He is certain that he will never know how to describe the feeling that blooms through his chest in that moment. His smile is wide and real when he says that he does love her, his child, their child, he always has, and he wonders how he's never seen before that she has the same eyes as him. He marvels over and over at the fact as they walk along the river, fourteen years of ice cream and sprinkles to catch up on.


End file.
